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Laughter and Life 

A Christian View of Amusements 

By 
ROBERT WHITAKER 

Pastor of the First Baptist Church of Los Gates, 

California, author of "The Gospel at Work 

in Modern Life," "My Country," etc. 



A PRIZE BOOK 



Philadelphia 
AMERICAN SUNDAY-SCHOOL UNION 

1816 Chestnut Street 






Copyright, 1915, 

by the 

American Sunday-School Union 



SEP 22 1915 

©CLA4105?! 
/ 



Publisher's Note 

This book is issued by the American Sunday- 
School Union under the John C. Green Income 
Fund. It won the second prize offered for the best 
manuscripts on the subject of Armosements : Hoio 
Can They Be Made to Promote the Highest Well- 
heing of Society f The provisions of the Fund 
authorize the Union to choose the subject, — which 
must always be germane to the objects of tlie 
Society, — and by owning the copyright, to reduce 
the price of the book. In this way works of a high 
order of merit may be put in circulation at a reason- 
able price. The author is given large liberty in the 
literary form, style, and treatment of the subject. 

The book deals in a fresh and original way 
with the relation of laughter to life. It shows 
how one may laugh for God as well as pray to 
God and serve God. The theme is of universal 
practical interest to church and Sunday-school 
workers, parents and teachers, as well as to the 
increasing number of those who are devoting 
themselves to the promotion of the play life of 
the nation. That it won a prize in competition 
with other fresh and able treatments of the theme 
indicates its special excellence. It should well 
serve its mission of making laughter enrich and 
strengthen rather than debase human life. 

3 



Contents 



Page 

I. The Seriousness of Laughter . 7 

II. The Christ of the Playground . 22 

III. The Natural Function of Play . 35 

IV. Is Happiness the Greatest Good ? 49 



V. ' ' Who' s Who ' ' in Morals ? . 

YI. ' ' And Who Is My Neighbor ? ' ' 

VII. The Exploitation of Fun 

VIII. Legislation and Laughter . 

IX. Sport and Evangelism . 

X. The Diffusion of Delight 



58 

71 

88 

101 

120 

136 



• \ 



Laughter and Life 

CHAPTER I 

THE SEEIOUSNESS OF LAUGHTEE 

There is nothing in the world more serious 
than laughter. It is the index of the individual 
mind, more revealing commonly than tears. A 
man laughs normally more than he cries, and his 
laughing is more indicative of character. For the 
reason also that it is more natural, more spontane- 
ous, more irrepressible, laughing has more to do 
with the making or unmaking of a man than tears. 
Some have indeed cried themselves out of the 
kingdom of heaven, — or the kingdom of the 
heavenly, if you please, — and have condemned 
themselves, for the rest of life, to the outer dark- 
ness of unnecessary fears and unwholesome fault- 
finding. But many more have laughed them- 
selves out of all the abiding treasures of life here 
and life hereafter ; — out of honesty, out of purity, 
out of decency, out of all sense of God and of 
good. It is no accident that the writer of the 
first psalm in the ancient Hebrew hymn-book winds 
up his description of the negative side of the 

7 



8 LATJGHTEE AND LIFE 

blessed life with the picture of a man who sits in 
" the seat of the scorner." There is nothing so 
contrary to happiness of a real and permanent 
character as the wrong kind of laugh. To know 
how and when to laugh is to know how to live. 
Nor are the social consequences of laughter 
less important than are the individual. " The 
seat of the scorner " has had more influence in 
world politics thus far than have the wisest and 
most serious statesmen. "World-peace has been 
laughed out of court for two thousand years, the 
laughter growing less pronounced with every 
century ; and it is quite within the memory of 
those yet young that men have come to consider 
it without a supercilious smile or an incredulous 
sneer. The same moral standard for men and 
women, " the single standard in morals," is still a 
joke to many, and more provocative of laughter 
than of legislation. The divorce evil in modern 
life keeps pace side by side with the immoral 
witticisms of the daily press at the expense of the 
home and the marriage relation. So long as the 
multitude joke at domestic tragedies, the tragedies 
themselves will be multitudinous. Every nation 
whose moral standard is low has a high pleasure- 
seeking temperature. The two great scourges of 
humanity, greater than war or pestilence, are the 
love of money unjustly gained, and the love of 
pleasure unwisely sought. The love of lucre and 
the love of laughter are still the pathways by 



THE SERIOUSNESS OF LAUGHTER 9 

which most men and women are led astray. And 
it is for pleasure's sake, more than for any other 
cause, that men love money. 

The following incident happened only a few 
years ago in California, — perhaps the most pleasure- 
loving state in the Union, — and within a few miles 
of the city which has sometimes prided itself upon 
the dubious title, the " Paris of America." It was 
a summer Saturday evening, the hour, for many, 
of rest and of recreation. A young man of 
twenty-two was in charge of his brother's store 
while the brother and his family were making a 
visit to the old home and to the old folks more 
than three thousand miles away. At the end of a 
busy and prosperous day, because the banks had 
not been open since noon and he did not care to 
leave the receipts of the afternoon and evening in 
the store, the young man put the money in his 
hip-pocket, and started to walk home. He was a 
popular young fellow, liked and trusted by every- 
one who knew him ; a Christian man, with an 
enviable reputation for ability and good-will, and 
because he was so generally liked and trusted, he 
in turn liked and trusted every one else. 

On the way home that night, however, al- 
though he had only a short distance to go along a 
well-traveled road, he was robbed in a way that 
should have shamed even a barbarous land. 
Those who beat him down, — so ruthlessly that he 
died a few days later from his wounds, — were 



10 LAUGHTER AND LIFE 

boys younger than himself, his own neighbors, and 
under ordinary circumstances his friends. They 
had no sense of the real value of money, and they 
did not rob him primarily for money's sake. Two 
of them were arrested the next night on their way 
home from San Francisco, where they had spent 
the Sunday " shooting the chutes " with a couple 
of young girl friends and " having a good time " 
generally. The money which paid for the " good 
time" for the girls and themselves had been 
clutched with bloody hands the night before from 
the pockets of the murdered lad. 

Most of the crimes of the world are committed 
for the sake either of power or of pleasure, 
l^early all juvenile crime has " fun " of some sort 
or other as its object. K'ine-tenths of the crimes 
of violence, whether committed by boys or men, 
are done directly by those who, if they get money, 
will spend it at once on what they call " pleasure." 
Most of the world's horrors have the appetite for 
"amusement" back of them. Even when the 
crime is not individual, and there is no conscious 
pursuit of pleasure at the cost of life, the mischief 
which men do their fellows is quite generally 
wrought for the sake of providing favorites of one 
kind or another with the means of following 
pleasure. If we do not rob and kill directly to 
get our own spending-money for " fun," we are 
much inclined to make light of law and justice to 
win the smiles and laughing applause of those who 



THE SEEIOUSNESS OF LAUGHTEE 11 

wait upon us or upon whom we spend, ourselves. 
Wrong pleasure-seeking is at the bottom of most 
of the unnecessary misery of the world. 

It is this trait which explains that sinister refer- 
ence in the old Scripture known to us as " Deb- 
orah's Song : " 

" Through the window she looked forth, and cried, 

The mother of Sisera cried through the lattice, 
* Why is his chariot so long in coming ? 

Why tarry the wheels of his chariots ? ' 

Her wise ladies answered her, 

Yea, she returned answer to herself, 
' Have they not found, have they not divided the spoil? 

A damsel, two damsels, to every man; 

To Sisera a spoil of dyed garments, 

A spoil of dyed garments embroidered, 

Of dyed garments embroidered on both sides, 
on the necks of the spoil ? ' " 

Back of Sisera, tyrant, murderer and despoiler, 
were the women of his court, and even his own 
mother, who were more concerned for the pretty 
raiment which his victories would bring them, 
and the delights which his ravishings would add 
to their amusements and to the amusements of the 
men with whom they were accustomed to revel, 
than they were for any considerations of justice 
and decency and humanity. The deed of Jael, 
in slaying Sisera by stealth as she did, shocks our 
moral sensibilities, and Deborah's exultation over 
it is hard to reconcile with the ordinary under- 
standing of divine inspiration. But to measure 



12 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

rightly either Jael's dreadful deed, or Deborah's 
dubious delight in that deed, one needs to study 
carefully that other figure in the background of 
the story, — "the mother of Sisera," who looked 
" through the lattice," devoted to her own enjoy- 
ments and to the ruthless " fun " of those ancient 
days, which meant immeasurable misery for the 
many and the wrecking of a nation and a nation's 
faith. 

There runs through the last book of the Bible, 
with all its weird and wonderful imagery, some- 
thing of the same stern strain which startles the 
superficial reader of Deborah's ode. Here also is 
a song of triumph, a more extended song for a 
vastly more spectacular and comprehensive vic- 
tory. All the world's wickedness, all the piled-up 
cruelties of the long, long centuries of human op- 
pression, here come to their Megiddo at once. 
The woman figures here also, both as oppressor 
and oppressed ; both as the inspirer of victory and 
as one drunk with desire for blood. Here is war- 
fare immeasurable, — defeat and overthrow in 
which nature is joined with the supernatural 
in terms that fairly bankrupt language. And 
through it all there runs again the tragedy of 
false laughter, the woe of unprincipled pleasure- 
seeking, the dreadful darkness of " amusement " 
gone mad. 

To understand the sanguinary symbols of the 
Apocalypse, — the wrath that rejoices not in the 



THE SEEIOUSNESS OF LAUGHTEE 13 

overthrow of an army, but in the overwhelming 
of a world ; not in the discomfiture of an indi- 
vidual woman, but in the utter destruction of the 
world-city pictured forth as the mother of world- 
ravishers, — one needs to study thoroughly the 
moods, especially the pleasure moods, of ancient 
Eome. See the laughing crowds in ISTero's gar- 
dens, making merriment all the night long, while 
burning Christians in their shrouds of fire light 
up the boisterous festivities. Harken to the roar 
of the lions in the arena, where the famished 
beasts are turned loose to feed in public on tender 
women and children whose only offense is that 
they have confessed to the pure faith in one 
" Christos," who himself went to a yet more ter- 
rible death, accompanied with wagging of heads 
and laughter. Or watch, — if you can bid yourself 
imagine the horrors which were once the favorite 
pastimes of the mistress of the world, — the in- 
satiate slaughter of slaves from among the 
brawniest and best of all nations, while the 
crowds shout their applause at the rare " fun " of 
blood-letting without limit, and impatiently turn 
down their thumbs at the bare suggestion of a 
momentary mercy. Consider these things, and 
then sit in judgment, if you dare, upon the 
pent-up indignation of those who, in the face of 
such a world-mania for amusement at any cost, 
longed and looked for the overwhelming of the 
whole vast iniquity in a whirlwind of divine wrath. 



14 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

And consider also how much of the world's mad 
devotion to amusement is now and ever has been 
the bulwark of lawless tyranny and of all man- 
ner of social corruption and abuse. Back of every 
Sisera that the world has ever known ; back of 
all the throned and feted wickedness of our own 
age, which still rules with the ruthlessness of an- 
cient Eome, there is the face of a false and heart- 
less festivity at the latticed window, the dancing 
figures of those who even to-day get their amuse- 
ments at the cost of only a little less obvious hu- 
man holocaust. 

The world's spoiling still goes on as a part of 
the world's sporting very much more than most 
of us realize. And it is the more to our shame, 
by reason of all that the martyrs suffered for us, 
and in view of the twenty centuries of Christian 
ministry between us and them, that such cruelties 
as we see in present-day social conditions are the 
fruit of our modern festivities, and of our utter 
failure to conform our pleasure-making and pleas- 
ure-seeking to the mind of Christ. IsTor is there 
anything which more seriously threatens the 
stability of our modern civilizations, or which 
creates more of wrathful contempt toward them, 
than the revulsion felt by the oppressed of our 
time, and by those who speak for them, against 
the callous and often conscienceless merrymaking 
of to-day. Every revolution in history has been 
heated to the exploding-point by the mood of those 



THE SEEIOUSNESS OF LAUGHTEE 15 

who made more of their own amusement than of 
the rights and necessities of their fellow-men. 

Is there a more ominous saying of Jesus than 
this ? — " And as were the days of I^oah, so shall 
be the coming of the Son of man. For as in those 
days which were before the flood they were eating 
and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, 
until the day that JNToah entered into the ark, and 
they knew not until the flood came, and took them 
all away ; so shall be the coming of the Son of 
man." 

It is but a superficial study of these words, also, 
which concerns itself with them only in a literal 
way as either history or prophecy. Both of these 
they are in a larger way than the multitude of 
commentators have ever noted. Has there ever 
been a social crisis, a world cataclysm, to which 
the majority of its victims did not dance in utter 
obliviousness of the judgment which was about to 
fall upon them ? Kome increased in gaiety as she 
neared her fall. Back of the French Ke volution 
is the brilliant court of Louis XIY, " Le Grand 
Monarque," with all the light effervescence of 
the merrymaking at Yersailles, — a merrymaking 
which did not cease till the guillotine had actu- 
ally begun its work. When was the slave-oli- 
garchy more facetious and devoted to its festivi- 
ties than during the days just before the war that 
deluged our land in the blood of fratricidal strife ? 

To get at the soul of this saying of Jesus, how- 



16 LAUGHTER AND LIFE 

ever, we need no inquiry as to the exact historical 
value of his reference to the story of the Noachian 
deluge, nor as to the particular import of his words 
in a prophetic way concerning the end of all the 
ages. Rather do we need the wisdom to read these 
words in the light of all history, and to catch 
their significance for our own immediate future. 
Was it not in the same spirit that Jesus rebuked 
the leaders of his own generation, because they 
were so apt at reading the weather-signs and so 
blind in understanding the far more certain signs 
that portended their own destruction as a nation ? 
They also danced to their death, in spite of his 
efforts to sober them and to show them the mis- 
chief of their light laughter and their mocking 
scorn. And we also dance, and laugh, and make 
merry, while the clouds gather to-day. 

Who is there among us more kindly or more 
human than the poet of our own times, Edwin 
Markham, who came to his fame through his im- 
passioned plea to the " masters, lords, and rulers 
of all lands " against their light and sometimes 
scornful indifference toward " the man with the 
hoe " ? Yet is there not even in his kindly and 
fraternal verse a touch of the spirit of Deborah's 
song when he surveys the judgments of history ? 

*' There was no substance in their soaring hopes, 
The voice of Thebes is but a desert cry ; 
A spider bars the road with filmy ropes 
Where once the feet of Carthage thundered by. 



THE SEEIOUSNESS OF LAUGHTER 17 

" A bittern booms where once fair Helen laughed; 
A thistle nods where once the Forum poured ; 
A lizard lifts, and listens on a shaft 

Where once of old the Colosseum roared." 

Great poetry that, and greater prophecy. Who 
that reads it with any sense of the significance of 
world-history for our own generation, and the 
generations yet to be, can fail to wonder whether, 
back of the proud hopes and vainglory of our own 
vaunted civilizations, there is any more of sub- 
stance than there was at the heart of those long- 
ago empires that are now dust-covered with for- 
getfulness ? 

It is not in the study of our battleships, our 
military resources, nor yet in " the unseen em- 
pire " of finance, that we shall find the answer to 
those who question the permanence of our present 
political and industrial order. Neither our states- 
men nor our money-magnates are going to deter- 
mine the destiny of the civilization which holds the 
helm of the world to-day. It was not Herod but 
Herodias who slew John the Baptist. And it is 
not the rulers of our day who threaten most the 
lives of its prophets. The pleasure-makers have 
been the mightiest unmakers of both prophets and 
peoples. They are more dangerous to-day than 
all the armies of alien races, or all the conspira- 
cies of alienated members of our own race and 
nation. These are our real anarchists, whose 
laughter is more destructively explosive than any 



18 LAUGHTER AND LIFE 

bombs that the " reds " have yet invented ; for 
their mistaken merriment is able to dissolve the 
strongest bands of law and order, and to shatter 
into nothingness ideals which it has taken cen- 
turies to build. These are our " yellow peril," 
who not merely cheapen the markets of the 
world and reduce the standard of subsistence, 
but who bring life itself to impotence and beg- 
gary. A nation that seeks only to be amused, 
and knows not how to seek amusement where 
wholesome and recreating pleasure is really to be 
found, is already touched with the hectic flush of 
death, though for a while its color may be mis- 
taken for the glow of unrestrained life. 

And since it is youth that is normally frolic- 
some and buoyant, and since the young are both 
masters and victims when false pleasures prevail, 
it is the " joy-life " of youth which determines 
what will be the after-life of nations and institu- 
tions. Given a race whose young people know 
how to be amused and how not to be amused, 
and the future of that race is secure. The king- 
dom of God is not " eating and drinking," nor yet 
" marrying and giving in marriage," nor is it, in 
itself, pleasure-making of any kind. But the king- 
dom of God comes into the world, and abides in the 
world, very much as men and women, and espe- 
cially young men and women, learn the wisdom of 
a heaven-born laughter and the power of an un- 
sullied joy. 



THE SEEIOUSNESS OF LAUGHTEE 19 

The Puritans were right in their fear of the 
world's revelries. Thej judged not without 
knowledge when they noted the connection be- 
tween the merrymaking of the Cavaliers and the 
rottenness in both Church and State for which 
these Cavaliers were sponsors. Our own great 
cities bear witness to the fact that hilariousness 
of a certain conspicuous sort marks both those 
who barter individual virtue and those who sell 
out public rights. The alliance between the 
vendors of vice and the purchasers of special 
privilege, by which the centers of our population 
have been made despoilers both of individual mo- 
rality and of public opportunity, has been evi- 
denced in a devotion at both ends of society to 
amusements that are reckless alike of personal 
and social consequences. At no point are the 
habitues of the slums and the " higher-ups " so 
much alike as in their common devotion to false 
ideals of pleasure. Their amusements are not 
very different in form, and in motive and outcome 
they are identical to a startling degree. 

On the other hand, however, the Puritans were 
deficient in the matter of affirmative education 
concerning the joyous side of life. There is such 
a thing as laughing/br God and with God, instead 
of laughing at God and the things which make for 
Godlikeness in man. Amusement is more natural 
than melancholy, and certainly far more healthful. 
There is no reason to regard despondency as mor- 



20 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

ally helpful, nor amusement of the right sort as 
contrary to spiritual health. The very word 
" solemn " was originally a mirth-suggesting term. 
Life is never so serious in the true sense of the 
word as when it is sanely and generously happy. 
Heaven means, not more tears, but the wiping 
away of tears. There is a divine logic back of the 
irrepressible insistence of faith that immortality 
and happiness were meant to be one and insepa- 
rable. It is because happiness is so good, so ex- 
ceedingly good, that its prostitution is so bad, so 
exceedingly bad. It is because happiness belongs 
so naturally to youth that youth has so much need 
to guard it jealously. And it is because the ways 
of false amusement are so strewn with the wrecks 
both of individuals and of nations, that there is 
before us no more important work, whether in a 
personal or in a social way, than the reclamation 
of the vast areas of human pleasure-seeking. If 
we let these levels of life fall into neglect, they 
will prove a veritable dismal-swamp, breeding all 
manner of miasma, and every kind of noxious 
growth and every form of destructive life. Drain 
our amusements of false ideals and plant them 
with the best fruitage of human sympathy and 
service, and they will prove to be the very grana- 
ries of God. There is no bigger work to which 
any of us can address ourselves than to teach our- 
selves and to help others to learn the wisdom of 
Christian amusement, of sound and unselfish 



THE SEEIOUSNESS OF LAUGHTER 21 

pleasure-seeking, of laughing in perfect fellowship 
with our Father in heaven. "For whether we 
eat or drink, or whatsoever we do," we are ex- 
horted by the Apostle of most serious purpose 
and most strenuous life, to do it all " as unto the 
Lord." And it was the same Apostle who in the 
midst of much trial exhorted, "Eejoice in the 
Lord always: again I will say, Rejoice." So 
then we have the authority of Scripture, as we 
have both of nature and of common sense, for the 
sanctity of happiness. And, as will later appear, 
no small part of the Christian life is included in 
what we are here describing as "laughing unto 
the Lord." 



CHAPTER II 
THE CHEIST OF THE PLAYGEOUND 

The Christ of the Gospels is a very different fig- 
ure from the Christ of Catholic art. The face and 
form which stand forth on the pages of the New- 
Testament present both a stronger and a happier 
man than the art galleries have ever yet set forth. 
He is neither the halo-encircled child, in the arms 
of some Italian or Flemish mother, nor is he the 
limp corpse, all stained with sanguinary blotches, 
whose portraiture is an appeal to the violent sym- 
pathies of untutored minds. The Jesus of the 
Gospels is the most masterful and at the same 
time the most charming figure of history, the Man 
of all men, divinely human and most humanly 
divine. 

There is a famous passage in the first Gospel in 
which Jesus is reported to have asked his disciples, 
" Who do men say that the Son of man is ? " 
This question is followed by the more intimate 
one, " But who say ye that I am ? " So much at- 
tention has been given to this later inquiry, and 
especially to the strong confession of Peter's faith 
which it evoked, that very little note has been 
taken of the answer to the first question. Yet 

22 



THE CHEIST OF THE PLAYGROUND 23 

this other answer throws a flood of light on the 
impression which Jesus made upon his contempo- 
raries, and it shows how far away from the actual 
" Son of man " is the pietistic and ecclesiastical 
Christ. " And they said, Some say that thou art 
John the Baptist ; some, Elijah ; and others, Jere- 
miah, or one of the prophets." 

Kow a significant thing about this reply is the 
revelation which it gives of the manliness of Jesus. 
We have heard so much about the " meek and 
lowly Jesus," and we are so accustomed to the 
artists' presentation of him with sorrowful, sub- 
missive, half-feminized face and garb, that it is 
rather difficult for the moment to take in the full 
import of these words. But here is the fact that 
John the Baptist, and Elijah, and Jeremiah were 
among the strongest and most masculine figures 
that we meet in all the story of Israel. All three 
were of the stuff of which heroes and martyrs are 
made. Indeed, they might have sat, — any one of 
them or all of them together, — for James Russell 
Lowell's famous portraiture in " The Present 
Crisis " of our own heroic progenitors of the 
Mayflower. 

" They were men of present valor, stalwart old iconoclasts, 
Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the Past's." 

It cannot be denied that this is a rather stern 
presentation of Jesus. But there are other pas- 
sages in the Gospels which are fully in accord 



24 LAUGHTER AND LIFE 

with the impression here set forth. The Christ 
of the whip of small cords was not the anaemic suf- 
ferer of a melancholy, medieval art. Keither is 
the Figure outside the Temple, contemplating its 
prospective ruin and analyzing the failure of 
Israel's leaders, as set forth in the tremendous 
Twenty-third of Matthew, the mild and listless 
man of the conventional canvas, or of the ordi- 
nary oral deliverance. When one reads the Gos- 
pels candidly, it is not diificult to understand the 
statement that the contemporaries of Jesus thought 
of him as John the Baptist, Jeremiah, or Elijah 
returned to earth to do battle royal for righteous- 
ness. 

The old poets were also too much affected by 
the same over-emphasis on the passivity of Jesus 
which has affected the artists generally, as witness 
the following from Thomas Dekker, a notable 
dramatic writer of the days of James I : 

" The best of men 
That e'er wore earth about him was a sufferer ; 
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit, 
The first true gentleman that ever breathed." 

The last line is appealing, but the description is 
neither an accurate presentation of the Jesus of 
the Gospels, nor a convincing picture of a gentle- 
man. That Jesus had the virtues of gentleness 
and patience and endurance in a high degree there 
is no doubt, but this picture needs a strong dash 



THE CHEIST OF THE PLAYGEOUND 25 

of virility in it to make it worthy of the approval 
of the real men of history or of modern life. 
More persuasive by far is the mere title of Thomas 
Hughes' famous essay, The Manliness of Christ. 
The man who wrote that book is dear to all 
schoolboys as the author of Tom Brown's School- 
Days, and its sequel, Tom Brown At Oxford. It 
is an interesting fact that Thomas Hughes was 
a pupil of the yet more famous Thomas Arnold, 
the great teacher of Rugby, who was himself a 
fit disciple of the virile and vigorous Christ. Both 
these men were gentlemen, and they are far safer 
guides to a true conception of the sort of man 
that Jesus was, than any amount of art or poetry 
which has been patterned after the imaginings 
of melancholy, cloistered saints. Jesus would be 
vastly more popular with men if we had not 
feminized and clericalized half of his manliness 
away. We have urgent need to get back to the 
iN'ew Testament type. 

And the Jesus of the Gospels is as attractive 
as he is vigorous. He was like John the Bap- 
tist, and yet very unlike him. Read Jesus' own 
contrast of himself with the great preacher of 
the desert. He is rebuking, with a touch of 
sarcastic humor, the unreasonableness of the 
Pharisees, who objected to John because he was 
owt a mixer among men, and who objected to 
Jesus for precisely the opposite reason that he 
was. " But whereunto shall I liken this genera- 



26 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

tion ? " he asks. " It is like unto children sitting 
in the market-place, who call unto their fellows, 
and say. We piped unto you, and ye did not 
dance ; we wailed, and ye did not mourn. For 
John came neither eating nor drinking, and they 
say. He hath a demon. The Son of man came 
eating and drinking, and they say. Behold, a 
gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of 
publicans and sinners." 

The reference is evidently to the games which 
Jewish children of Jesus' day were accustomed to 
play. Like children of all lands and all genera- 
tions, in their amusements they imitated their eld- 
ers, oftentimes using the serious functions of life 
for sport and entertainment. And these children 
complained of their companions that first of all 
they had played " wedding," and afterward they 
had played "funeral," and in neither case had 
they been able to suit their captious playfellows 
or to get them to enter into their sport. " We 
have piped, and you have not danced, we have 
wailed, and you did not mourn," or to follow 
more literally the graphic original, " you did not 
beat your breasts." 

It does not concern us here to dwell upon 
Jesus' indictment of the Pharisees. It is enough 
to say that men who do not want to be convinced 
are very much the same in all ages. Wedding or 
funeral, the result is identical : — they will not 
play. Truth cannot be presented in any guise 



THE CHEIST OF THE PLAYGEOTJND 27 

that is acceptable to the man who does not want 
to accept it. What concerns us more immediately 
here is the information which is incidentally 
brought out as to Jesus' interest in the play life 
of the children, and as to a certain aspect of his 
own life and character which impressed itself 
upon his contemporaries. Let us consider the 
latter of these first. 

The virile man is likely to be also the compan- 
ionable man. ll^ot always is this so, as it appears 
that John the Baptist lived much apart from his 
fellows. But this only marks the incompleteness 
of his character, and was probably due to excep- 
tional circumstances in his upbringing, or to the 
exigencies of his ministry. But even he had his 
disciples, who seem to have been warmly and 
tenderly attached to him. The same remarks ap- 
ply in a measure to Jeremiah and Elijah. 
Neither one of them was of the monkish type. 

Jesus, however, was not only like them ; he was 
different from them. The difference is naturally 
most marked when we contrast him with the one 
of the three who was nearest to him. His appre- 
ciation of John the Baptist was stated in the most 
positive terms, and is otherwise indicated in his 
whole attitude toward John. But although Jesus 
took up the message of John, apparently in much 
the same words at first, he pursued a very differ- 
ent course, and gave the message with a very dif- 
ferent emphasis. Jesus was, to use a modern 



28 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

term which has a distinctness that compensates 
for the lack of dignity occasionally attaching to it, 
a " good mixer." There is no recorded instance of 
his ever having refused an invitation to dinner. 
He began his ministry of miracles, according to 
the fourth Gospel, — which is emphatically the 
Gospel of his divinity, — by attending a wedding, 
and replenishing the wine when the supply ran 
short. The story raises some questions which need 
not be discussed here. Likewise Jesus' remark in 
the passage quoted above that certain observers 
called him " a gluttonous man, and a winebibber," 
is momentarily disturbing in its inferences. But 
the big outstanding fact is that Jesus believed in 
saving life by getting into it, not by getting out 
of it. The incarnation was not for him an incident 
to be identified wholly with his birth ; it was the 
habitude of his life. He lived the incarnation 
every day. 

And it is of no less importance to note that be- 
cause Jesus entered into human life, and identified 
himself with it ordinarily and habitually, he en- 
tered of necessity and yet willingly into the happy 
side of life, as well as into its sorrows and sins. 
That he " bore our griefs, and carried our sor- 
rows " is a fact which can hardly be over- 
emphasized. But it needs also to be impressed 
that he knew our joys and shared the happiness 
and even the humor of life. We have yet to meet 
frankly the evidences on the pages of the New 



THE CHEIST OF THE PLAYGEOUND 29 

Testament of the fine f acetiousness of Jesus. The 
last of the Gospel writers cannot take leave of the 
story of Jesus without a bit of broad exaggera- 
tion, which has in it an obvious touch of humor. 
" And there are also many other things which 
Jesus did, the which, if they should be written 
every one, I suppose that even the world itself 
would not contain the books that should be writ- 
ten." To treat those words with a literal sobriety 
is to impeach the author's wholesome naturalness 
and sound sense. 

Jesus caricatured the Pharisees for their cen- 
soriousness. " You are very careful to remove the 
least splinter from the eye of your neighbor, and 
cannot see that you have a whole log in your own 
eye," he remarked, — to put his words into present- 
day form. And in the same connection, while he 
warned his followers against an absurd over- 
seriousness in estimating the faults of others as 
against one's own shortcomings, he balanced the 
advice with another illuminating witticism about 
running to the opposite extreme of maudlin senti- 
mentalism by adding, " Don't cast your pearls be- 
fore pigs." 

But the best evidence of the naturalness, the 
humanness, the real humor of Jesus is in the fact 
that he was a much-sought guest, and was even 
accused of being a boon companion of those who, 
as the man of the street would now say, liked 
" good eats " and good times. That the freedom 



30 LAUGHTER AND LIFE 

of his fellowship was grossly misrepresented there 
is no doubt, but if the Pharisees of his own time 
were inclined to overstate the companio'nableness, 
the real comradeship of Jesus, there is little doubt 
that modern pietists of the phylactery-wearing, 
long-faced type have been equally disposed to 
ignore and obscure it. 

In further evidence is the fact that Jesus not 
only noted the children's games, and was inter- 
ested in their pastimes, but also that he pro- 
foundly interested and attracted the children 
themselves. Their parents brought them to him, 
but he took them in his arms, and his own initia- 
tive toward them is manifest when he took the 
child and set him in the midst of the disciples, 
thus holding up childhood as the ideal of the 
human side of the kingdom of God. ^o man 
could have handled children as he did, nor talked 
of them after his manner, who was not loved and 
admired by the children in return. 

l^ow children do not admire either the passive 
or the melancholy man. More than this, passivity 
and melancholy commonly go together. It is 
your strong man, even the man who has large 
capacity for sternness at times, who is in other 
moods and under more fortunate conditions a 
heartily and happily playful man. Yirility and 
laughter are generally on good terms. And the 
man who is not virile, and who does not know 
how to laugh, neither receives many invitations to 



THE CHEIST OF THE PLAYGEOUND 81 

dinner, nor readily gets the children on his knees. 
Under normal conditions Jesus was both a virile 
and a cheerful man. 

Here is a modern business man who goes every 
day to his work in the great city. He has been iden- 
tified with the financial world for nearly a quarter 
of a century, and deals every day in figures about 
stocks and bonds and investments and securities 
and hard cash, and a lot of other hard things. He 
is in the vigor of his own strength, a stocky, sturdy 
man, with a rather quick, imperious way about 
him which makes the full-grown stranger esteem 
him as temperamentally somewhat severe. Yet 
his own lad of ten comes jauntily down to the 
train to meet him, and goes home with him hand 
in hand. And both the man and the boy enjoy 
nothing better than a romp together in which 
laughter and shout work a transformation in the 
man's whole appearance and attitude. The very 
tensity of the man's make-up and activity lend 
themselves to an energy of play which is his charm 
for the boy. 

The positive man is the man who gives himself 
most effectively to the humor and the happiness 
and the sane amusements of life. That Jesus was 
a positive and not a negative character is no more 
certain than that he was, under conditions which 
afforded opportunity for good cheer and sportive- 
ness, a man of buoyant mood and mind as well. 
The sanctimonious Christ is not the Jesus of the 



32 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

Gospels, but a caricature brought forth by a de- 
cadent ecclesiasticism. ^o man could have held 
so mightily the love and enthusiasm and utmost 
devotion of a fellowship of hearty fisherfolk, — 
and especially such a one as Peter, — who did not 
have vast stores of hearty fellowship in himself. 
When Jesus "looked upon Peter" the doughty 
disciple saw a thousand home and table scenes in 
his eyes. There is only one home scene that re- 
mains to us from the thirty years of Jesus' life 
before he began his public career, but that one 
scene, as it is presented to us in the second chap- 
ter of the third Gospel, is singularly and strikingly 
confirmatory of all that has here been said. It is 
the incident of his journey to Jerusalem and re- 
turn, when he was twelve years of age. This is 
the evangelist's brief remark in explanation of the 
manner in which his mother Mary and Joseph 
lost track of him on their way home : " Suppos- 
ing him to be in the company, they went a day's 
journey ; and they sought for him among their 
kinsfolk and acquaintance." 

ISTo such supposition as Mary and Joseph held 
concerning Jesus could have been possible if they 
had not already had long experience of his com- 
panionableness and the ease with which he was 
entertained. The irresistible impression of the 
narrative is that of a child who was liked and 
likable, a clever, kind, merry lad of twelve years 
who was so much desired by every one that his 



THE CHEIST OF THE pLAYGBOUNB 33 

own mother did not know till nightfall that he had 
not been somewhere in the caravan all day. It is 
the Christ of laughter, song, and joyousness who 
is here ; the Christ of the playground and not the 
thorn-crowned Man of the Cross. 

The very wonder of those who found him in the 
Temple, and of those who listened with them to 
his inquiries and replies, is itself a token of the 
same thing. Mary and Joseph marveled to find 
him in such a place, because he was so like any 
other boy that they had not thought to look for 
him there. It was only " after three days " that 
they found him in the Temple, indicating plainly 
enough that the Temple was no more the first 
place where they looked for him than the church, 
or the synagogue, would be the first place where 
you would look for your boy of twelve in a great 
city. " Knew ye not that I must be in my Fa- 
ther's house?" as the Revised Version gives 
Jesus' wondering reply to his troubled mother's 
protest, has indeed at first sight a flavor of un- 
naturalness about it. But that is only because we 
have not yet learned to think of religion as a 
wholly natural thing. Jesus' answer would have 
little force if it were a disclaimer of his real hu- 
manity. It was as if he had said, " Why should 
you think, because I am a boy among boys as you 
know me, full of life and play and enjoyment, 
that I could not enjoy my Father's house ? One 
doesn't have to be unnatural to be religious, does 



34 LAXJGHTEE AND LIFE 

he ? " And because he was so wholly a real lad 
they marveled at his clearness of mind and his 
intensity of religious interest, even as we are still 
surprised, if not a little shocked, whenever relig- 
ion is treated in the manner of every-day life. 



CHAPTEK III 

THE NATUEAL FUNCTION OF PLAY 

Theee is only one passage in the Bible where 
the expression " boys and girls " is found. It is 
part of a very graphic picture in the prophecy of 
Zechariah. The prophet has been reciting the 
jealousy of " the Lord of hosts " for Jerusalem. 
It has been a fierce, sometimes a consuming, jeal- 
ousy. But always the jealousy has been for Jeru- 
salem's good. And now comes the promise of 
peace and prosperity for the city, when Jerusalem 
shall be the " holy city " indeed. As the prophet 
sees it, the picture is not that of " a lonely cross 
upon a lonely hill." A happier hope and a more 
joyous expectation stir the heart of the ancient 
seer. It is rather the picture of old men and old 
women sitting in the sun by the roadside, — so old 
that for very age they have need of staffs on which 
to lean, but tranquil, untroubled, and serene in the 
security of a city which has ceased to be girt about 
by alien armies and trodden down of nations which 
come ravaging from afar. The picture is verified 
with a " Thus saith the Lord ; " and included under 
the same signature, standing out upon the same 
canvas, is this counterpart of untroubled old age, 

35 



36 LAUGHTER AND LIFE 

— " And the streets of the city shall be full of 
boys and girls playing in the streets thereof." 
All the open spaces of the city are seen full both 
of playful children and of peaceful old age. 

There is a logical connection between the two 
aspects of this scene. The old age that muses in 
untroubled rest upon the supporting staff is itself 
the legitimate outcome of that freedom and ful- 
ness of life which first of all expresses itself in the 
playing of boys and girls. There is very little 
serene old age where there has been little or no 
youthful play. Nor can any city be said to be 
truly civilized until all its affairs, even to its 
streets, are dominated by the welfare of the 
grandsire and the child. The social order which 
gives abundance of play at one end of life, and 
abundance of peace at the other end of life, is the 
only social order with which a really rational and 
a really religious people can be content. The city 
of Zechariah's vision has never yet been, but it is 
going to be. That it is on the way is no more 
evidenced by our old-age pensions and other pro- 
visions for the sunny security of those who have 
come to fulness of years, than it is by our present 
emphasis on play and playgrounds with relation to 
the education and development of the child. We 
do not yet realize to the full in a social way the 
vast consequences of sanity in our amusements, the 
utter seriousness, in relation to the general wel- 
fare, of our laughing moods and our provision for 



THE NATUEAL FUNCTION OF PLAY 37 

feeding the appetite for pleasure. 'Not yet as fol- 
lowers of Jesus do we have the courage of his 
naturalness, and the enthusiasm for such an entire 
incarnation of the divine in the whole of human 
life as he himself expressed. But we are learning, 
through much unnecessary cost in life and treas- 
ure, how destructive false amusements can be. 
We are learning also, in spite of much timidity 
of soul, that real religion has nothing to fear from 
real living. And over against the damage of a 
perverted pleasure instinct and the mischiefs of 
morbid religiousness, we are coming slowly but 
certainly to see how absolutely natural, how in- 
evitably human, play is. 

Had we " considered the lilies " a little more, 
we might have seen this long ago. At least, if 
we had followed the example of Jesus in turn- 
ing to the world of nature round about us, and 
to the phenomena of every-day life for tokens 
of the divine, we might much sooner have noted 
the part which play occupies in the economy of 
the natural order, in what we may call God's 
commonplace school. 

That which we call nature is running over with 
play. Every spring-time morning is musical with 
the song of birds. Every pasture and every wood- 
land place where the creatures of field and forest 
have any sense of security for their young, is 
riotous with the gamboling of young life. Pup- 
pies and kittens, the children's pets, are so habit- 



38 LAUGHTEE AOT) LIFE 

ually humorous in all their bearing, so over-run- 
ning with continual laughter, as it were, that one 
must either beUeve the Creator had no part in 
making them, or else admit that fun and frolic 
are written large on the Almighty's works. The 
very cubs of the lion and the tiger, in their natu- 
ral lairs and when well fed, are living examples 
of nature's proneness to happiness. Life laughs 
through nature even in the fierceness of the wild. 

E"owhere does life laugh more blithely, nowhere 
is natural play more captivating, than in the hu- 
man child. And nowhere is the serious purpose 
of mirthfulness in the natural order more manifest 
than in the infancy and youth of man. New 
England has always been serious enough, and it 
is fitting that from a New England writer should 
come this earnest statement of the momentous 
meaning of play in relation to the evolution of 
life : " More important than the playground is the 
play. It is well that children should play in a 
safe place, but it is absolutely necessary that they 
should play somewhere if they are to grow up at 
all. For there is no doubt now, I think, in the 
minds of educators that play builds the child. It 
is the method that Nature has provided for his 
development. . . . The child who is deprived 
of his chance to play is deprived of his opportunity 
to grow up." 

So writes Joseph Lee, a social worker of na- 
tional prominence, and the author of Constructi/oe 



THE NATUEAL FUNCTION OF PLAY 39 

and Preventive Philanthropy^ in an article in 
The Craftsman for March, 1914:, under the sug- 
gestive title, "Eestoring Their Play Inheritance 
to Our City Children." Nor is it only the ref- 
erence to "city children" which is suggestive. 
" Their play inheritance " is that portion of the 
title which comprehends the children everywhere, 
and most suggests the vital function of play. 

That function is definitely stated in the four 
words, " Play builds the child." Whether in the 
human child, or in the offspring of the lower 
orders of life, play is a primary part of the build- 
ing process of God. There is in it the exercise 
that makes for strength, the glow that makes for 
beauty, and the social contact that most effect- 
ively relates the individual to his kind. When 
we consider what these things mean, — strength, 
beauty, fellowship, — and when we observe the 
part which laughter, sport, amusement, play, one 
and all, hold in the critical period of the child's 
development, it is hard to overestimate the nat- 
ural value of the frolic and merriment of youth. 
God has not only set upon them the warning sig- 
nal of the disastrous consequences of the misuse 
of mirth, but he has set in evidence quite as clearly 
the rich rewards which follow upon a proper use 
of the laughter side of life. Thus, it is written 
in our very nature that to refuse to play is to re- 
fuse to grow ; to despise amusement is to despise 
the blush of beauty and the glow of health ; to 



40 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

refrain from frolicsomeness is to set oneself apart 
a solitary prisoner within barriers of misunder- 
standing and contempt, l^ature says more com- 
mandingly than any human captain of the play- 
ground ever said it: "If you would hold your 
own or have any standing with your fellows, 

Play builds the child ; nor does its building 
cease with childhood's years. There is need of 
laughter so long as there is life. Not only is it 
true that in a multitude of instances education 
ceases too soon because men and women allow 
themselves to lose too easily the inquisitiveness of 
youth, but also that too often vigor itself declines 
and the moods of men and women are low be- 
cause they think of play as the exclusive right 
and privilege of the child. Getting old is largely 
forgetting how to be amused. 

One of our leading woman's magazines, a little 
while ago, told the following story : A tired and 
broken mother, heavily burdened " with much 
serving," went to her physician for advice, con- 
scious that she was on the verge of nervous pros- 
tration. The doctor talked with her long and 
intimately and then gave her this apparently 
whimsical counsel, " I want you to laugh fifteen 
minutes every day." The woman protested at 
the artificiality of such a course, since she had no 
inclination to laugh with any such regularity or 
continuity. But the physician was steadfast in. 



THE NATTJEAL FUNCTION OF PLAT 41 

his advice, and insisted that whether she felt like 
laughing or not she was to go through the mo- 
tions of the exercise. The very effort to do so 
affected her to spontaneous laughter. Her effort 
and example, in turn, affected the family in the 
same way. Mirth and vivacity took the place of 
a too serious atmosphere in the home. The result 
was not only the restoration to health of the 
wife and mother, but a toning up of the whole 
family life through a softening and gladdening of 
social relations in the home circle. That which 
had been begun as a matter of faithfully follow- 
ing out a singular medical prescription, and with 
an awkward consciousness of artifice behind it, 
was continued as the natural expression of a 
changed attitude of mind, and with a thorough- 
going conviction back of it of the moral as well 
as the physical value of the joyous life. 

" The Lord loveth a cheerful (Greek, hilaros) 
giver." Giving is self-expression ; else it is not 
real giving at all. And self-expression is never 
more apt and serviceable than when it is touched 
with laughter. There is sound psychology back 
of the merriment which generally characterizes 
those who are known as good solicitors, or " good 
beggars." Begging appeals without a touch of 
humor are not likely to incite to generous giving, 
except when the pressure of tragedy is upon the 
hearts of those who give, l^either is there much 
of effective kindness apart from smiles. Too 



42 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

much goodness is spoiled because it is not cheer- 
ful goodness. In every department of life men 
who are afraid to laugh express themselves poorly. 
Nature is on the side of the physician who smiles. 
Humor is a natural corrective of the intricacies 
and absurdities of the law. Cervantes availed 
himself of one of the mightiest weapons in na- 
ture's armory when he laughed out of court the 
sham chivalry of old through the antics of Don 
Quixote. Health of body, health of mind, health 
of soul, are none of them far removed from the 
kind of hilarity that God loves. 

Let us not think of play on the physical side, then 
as having to do only with the exercise of undevel- 
oped muscles, the method for maturing the young 
through unforced activity. This it is, but very 
much more. Play, whether in old or young, may 
be defined as the spontaneity of self-expression. 
It is the cleansing overflow of life. Without it 
life is a stagnant pool, a closed fire, a corpse in 
which the blood has ceased to flow. Cheerful 
giving of oneself in one form or another, — happy, 
exuberant, playful self-expression, — is to both child 
and man what the putting forth of leaves is to the 
tree, what the babbling of the brook is to the 
stream, what the up-leap of the flame is to the 
fire. Play is more than nature's way of securing 
exercise; it is exercise plus all that cheerfulness 
implies. 

And beauty is just as truly the gift of God as 



THE NATUEAL FUNCTION OF PLAY 43 

strength. It is quite as much to be desired in its 
place. If it is possible to quote Scripture in de- 
preciation of beauty, it is equally easy to cite pas- 
sages which cast contempt on strength. Both 
beauty and strength may be so emphasized as to 
become a vanity, but as nature knows them they 
are both good, and are alike tokens of inner health 
and abounding life. Laughter is nature's boudoir 
quite as much as nature's gymnasium. It is there 
that she rubs in her cosmetics as well as the oil of 
strength. In the natural laboratories of life play 
produces with equal facility unforced activity and 
unconscious beauty. Even an ugly face is illu- 
mined by a smile. Old age grows young again 
when gladness chases the wrinkles of the years 
away. What the play of light and. shadow is to 
the desert, fun and frolic are to the face sallowed 
o'er with care. Liveliness and loveliness have 
more than an affinity of sound for each other. 
They who laugh for God are touched instantly 
with the " beauty of the Lord." 

Amusement of the right sort is to a man what 
sunshine is to the face of nature under favorable 
conditions. Even sunshine may scorch and de- 
stroy, but this is not its function in nature's normal 
moods. It is meant to fructify and to beautify, 
to touch the earth with the up-leaping activity of 
life, and to make even the desolate places smile 
with a delightsomeness all their own. So is it 
with the play instinct in man. It is both life-giv- 



44 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

ing and beauty-bestowing. And the one is as 
truly a part of its divine intention as the other. 
There would be more both of beauty and of 
strength if men would learn better how to laugh 
and how to play as God meant them to laugh and 
to play. 

Nor do these two phases, — strength and beauty, 
— exhaust the natural utility of laughter and sport. 
There is no mightier social cement than amuse- 
ment of a natural and wholesome kind. Man 
may work alone after a fashion, but it is well- 
nigh impossible for man to play alone. Play is 
essentially a group exercise. It does not make 
for activity or for beauty more inevitably than 
it makes for sociability. Laughter is a solvent 
which dissipates the asperities of individual inter- 
ests and idiosyncrasies as almost nothing else will 
do. There would be vastly more co-operation in 
the world's labor if there were more of unselfish 
mutuality in the world's play. 

Play builds the child : — builds him in strength, 
builds him in beauty, builds him in fellowship with 
. all his kind. Even wild animals naturally destruc- 
tive of one another have been taught to live on 
terms of peace through the discipline of youthful 
play. The playgrounds of our public schools have 
been more effective recruiting-stations for democ- 
racy than have been the text-books which the chil- 
dren have studied. International athletic meets 
have helped to break down race prejudice. The 



THE NATUEAL FUNCTION OF PLAY 45 

man who can make both sides laugh can almost 
always stay a fight. The world's amusements 
ought to be and can be among the world's might- 
iest peacemakers, not only building society as well 
as the individual into strength and becomingness, 
but building up that world federation of every 
nation, and kindred, and tribe that is to be. 

Because play is natural, however, and because, as 
nature gave it, it has such manifold and mighty 
ministry, play, to do its best work, must be kept 
natural. JSTature is on the side of amusement only 
when amusement is on the side of nature. There 
is nothing of youthfulness, and very little of nat- 
uralness, about much that passes current as sport, 
and therefore it does not make for the upbuilding 
of life. " A merry heart doeth good like a med- 
icine," but like many another medicine to-day, 
there are a good many imitations of the merry heart 
which are sold under the false pretense of being 
just as good. And that other Scripture, " He that 
is of a merry heart hath a continual feast," while 
it may be and ought to be suggestive of enjoyment 
and re-invigoration, is too often like the feast over- 
done, or the table unwisely provided, more suggest- 
ive of an indigestible surfeit and shortened days. 
There is quite as much danger to the body, and a 
good deal more danger to the soul, whether of the 
individual or of society, from poisoned laughter 
than there is from poisoned meat. 

Nature cannot be quoted on the side of either 



46 LAUGHTER AND LIFE 

specialized or commercialized play. She knows 
nothing of " rooters " and " side-lines." Her 
play is as personal and democratic as it is sponta- 
neous and sincere. She has no paid clowns, and 
no high salaried referees. She is not in har- 
mony, either by her own example or by the pen- 
alties that she exacts from those who depart from 
her example, with six days of grinding labor and 
a " week-end " of demoralizing " fun." Horses 
may be worked to death by man, but they do not 
naturally either work themselves or play them- 
selves into premature graves. It is the human 
who both toils and amuses himself to death. 
E"ature does not choose a few to be athletes and 
actors all their days, and the rest to be an audi- 
ence for them. Perhaps we In ay not press to the 
utmost the analogies of nature, but when we 
consider the matter of amusement, this part of 
the upbuilding process of God's world around us 
cannot be used to justify either the professional 
fun-maker or the man whose concern is to make 
money by furnishing a forced merriment for his 
kind. The natural function of play, — to build up 
the man in strength, beauty, and unity with his 
fellows, — requires for its largest utility much more 
of naturalness, simplicity, and democracy in play. 
Every man, if he is to get out of his play facul- 
ties what nature has to give him, must develop the 
resources of laughter, play, and amusement, which 
are within himself. The evils of sport are nearly 



THE NATUEAL FUNCTION OF PLAY 47 

all professional and commercial. Whatever of 
playfulness we may find in Jesus, when he is seen 
through natural eyes, there was absolutely not a 
whit of subsidized and specialized " fun " about 
him. He was too entirely divine to be anything 
but entirely natural. And this, in a word, is 
what is the matter with the major part of the 
world's amusement and amusement-seeking to- 
day. The whole field of healthful merriment 
has been fenced about with staring walls of arti- 
fice, which are painted from top to bottom with 
the dollar sign. Play is not natural as a profes- 
sion. Our modern players are, for the most part, 
as little of a Christian product as the professional 
jesters of medieval courts, l^o man with a 
Christian conception of life could wish to give 
himself to such a part. "What we would not 
choose for ourselves, we have no Christian right 
to impose upon another. 

But leaving this matter of the Christian ideal 
aside for the moment, the unnaturalness either of 
being hired to laugh, or of hiring another to 
laugh for us and to make us laugh, is sufiiciently 
manifest. It is the artificiality of modern life 
which justifies this artifice. Play in nature is a 
part of life, not something bought to cover up the 
evasion of all-round living. Play in nature is 
personal, spontaneous, not a vicarious sacrifice of 
creative intention on the part of one for a dubious 
diversion of another. In nature the laughter 



48 LAUGHTER AND LIFE 

that does not cease is idiotic, and the laughter 
that is hired is impossible. If we are going to 
justify amusement, then, because it is natural, be- 
cause we find it in the child and in the young of 
every creature as one of the most effective of the 
Creator's instruments for accomplishing the most 
beneficent ends of life, — growth, attractiveness, 
fellowship, — we must study to make our own 
amusements as free from artifice and barter as 
possible. Only so can they function as nature in- 
tended them. Whatever there is of salvation in 
laughter is one with God's salvation everywhere, 
and here also we have need to remember that 
it is not " of works " but is indeed the " free 
gift of God." 



CHAPTEE IV 
IS HAPPINESS THE GEEATEST GOOB! 

STANDiisra in the entrance-way of a large dry- 
goods store on one of the busiest street-corners in 
Los Angeles, this bit of conversation was heard 
by the writer as it suddenly rose, clear and dis- 
tinct above the sea of sound : " WJiere are you 
going, Madge f " 

It was a casual inquiry, addressed by one young 
woman to another, and the answer itself was lost 
in the swirl of the human stream. For this very 
reason, perhaps, — that the question broke in so 
abruptly upon the rush of daily commercialism, 
and that it stood apart almost as if it were a dis- 
embodied voice, — the inquiry remained as a kind 
of challenge to human life itself. The name but 
gave it a personal quality, made even more per- 
sonal by its intimate, familiar form. It was as if 
the soul of companionship, in the very midst of 
the multitude and of the thronging of immediate 
interests, had raised the issue, " What is it all 
about, and whither is our ultimate guest f " 

Quite in accord with the feeling inspired by 
this question, if it be allowed to arrest the im- 

49 



50 LAUGHTER AND LIFE 

agination, is the fact that in all ages the study of 
ethics, — that branch of philosophy concerned 
with character and conduct, — has resolved itself 
sooner or later into the inquiry so aptly phrased 
in the old church catechism : 

" What is the chief end of man f " The cate- 
chism answered its own inquiry in its own deeply 
serious way: "To glorify God, and enjoy Him 
forever.''^ It was a dignified answer, more digni- 
fied than definite, as we think of it to-day. There 
is not much of dignity, not much of apparent 
seriousness, in the repartee of the modern hu- 
morist to this question, but it is definite enough 
in its way, and the very humor of it gives it a 
certain right to be considered in this discussion 
of the laughter side of life. "TAe chief end of 
man" says this smiling philosopher, " is the ujpjper 
end ! " 

Each of these answers condemns the empty and 
purposeless life. Let us take the lighter answer 
first. If it be true that a man's head is of more 
consequence than his feet ; that it is his ability to 
think, and not merely his ability to run about, 
which counts ; that he is most significant, not at 
the point where he touches the ground, but at the 
point where he is nearest the skies, then play it- 
self must mean for him more than natural exercise 
and enjoyment. His " upper end," if it is indeed 
his " chief end," to take the flippant on terms of 
their own philosophy, ought to dominate both his 



IS HAPPINESS THE GEEATEST GOOD? 51 

work and his play. And there are few who will 
assert that either the industry or the amusement 
of the present time is rational in a high degree. 
We could therefore do far worse than to take this 
humorist's answer in a serious way. 

But the former answer, in spite of its somewhat 
formal sound for us of to-day, is the far better 
reply. It is better with respect to both work and 
play. There would be a revolution in industry at 
once if men were really persuaded that the fun- 
damental purpose of " business " is to glorify God, 
and to enter into man's inheritance of everlasting 
fellowship with the divine. And the question of 
what amusements are good and what amusements 
are evil is seen only in a high and clear light 
when it falls under the illumination of such a high 
definition of life. 

The primary mistake in much of our discussion 
of amusements is a failure to relate them in any 
large way to life itself. We go after our " good 
times " as we go after our gains, with nothing but 
the immediate object in view. It is the day's 
pleasure, as it is too often the day's work, which 
fills all our vision, until we see and seek nothing 
beyond. If there is need of the question, " Where 
are you going ? " at the door of every factory, 
and office, and store, there is even greater need of 
it at the door of every playhouse, and over the 
gates of all our " recreation " parks. Never is it 
more true than when we laugh and play that 



52 LAUGHTER AND LIFE 

what we do at any moment needs to be at least 
sub-consciously related to the real object and end 
of life. 

Kow there is an ideal which covers all contin- 
gencies, and knows no exceptions. It is a cri- 
terion of both character and career from which 
there is absolutely no escape. There is nothing 
which a man can do that may not be justly 
brought to the bar of this inquiry : Does it look 
toward perfection? If it does not, it is con- 
demned by every sound canon of reason and right. 
If it does, it stands approved, however the world 
to-day may mock it and misunderstand it. 
There is no rank or condition in life which is 
exempt from trial in this truly universal and 
genuinely catholic court. To make the most of 
oneself, and to play a full part in helping to make 
the most of the world in which we live, is the one 
ideal which serves as a touchstone for every possible 
situation to which either the individual or any 
group of individuals may come. Kingdoms and 
empires, courts and officials of every kind, schools 
and churches, the home, and even the lap of 
motherhood itself, must all, in the last analysis, 
submit themselves to this judgment, and stand or 
fall according to their ability to meet this test, Do 
they " make good " ? The very phrase itself con- 
demns our common application of it to mere 
mercantile success, or to the winning of popular 
applause. Nothing "makes good" which does 



IS HAPPINESS THE GEEATEST GOOD ? 53 

not make for good. Nothing is holy which does 
not make whole. J^othing is valid which does 
not add value. In the procession of life every 
step is a mistaken step which does not move in the 
direction of life's ultimate goal. 

And, if there is anything that the world greatly 
needs, it is to feel the harmony of real pleasure- 
making and real perfection. There is so much of 
sham and artifice with respect to both. Our 
notions of play are altogether too light, and our 
notions of perfection are altogether too heavy. 
The very term "nonsense" is a libel on the 
pleasure side of life. The first definition of 
" sober " in the Standard Dictionary is " possess- 
ing or characterized by well-balanced and properly 
controlled faculties." Who would wish to possess 
or to be characterized by poorly balanced or ill 
controlled faculties ? The same dictionary gives 
the following as its sixth and final definition of 
the word, but marks it " Scotch and obsolete," 
" characterized by smallness or poorness." Alas ! 
that impression of the word is neither limited to 
the canny Scotchman, nor is it yet wholly out of 
date. Originally, however, the word simply meant 
"not intoxicated," and to identify it with 
the word " melancholy," which is derived from the 
Greek word for " black bile," is to intimate that 
happiness is not a natural thing but is artificially 
created. 

The sober man, then, is simply the man who is 



54 LAUGHTER AND LIFE 

" not intoxicated." Does drunkenness make for a 
steady gait ? Certainly not ! ITor does any kind 
of evil or excessive indulgence make for a well bal- 
anced manhood or womanhood. If we would but 
see the matter sensibly, all manner of intoxicating 
excitement which passes for amusement is as poor 
an imitation of real pleasure as the staggering 
step of the drunkard is a miserable makeshift for 
walking. The fun that goes that kind of gait 
needs to be checked up with the consciousness of 
the real objective of life. There is nothing to 
hinder any of the King's children from skipping 
along the King's highway, as they go their way 
home, with laughter and song betimes. They 
who go moping along such a noble course are not 
worthy either of their origin or of their destiny, 
and can be excused onlj when they have suffered 
deprivation and oppression from their companions 
in the way. Even so, there is frequently, in laugh- 
ter, liberty from much injustice and wrong. But 
to stagger heavenward, besotted with a maudlin 
hilarity, is to duplicate the shame of the man who 
goes to his lighted cottage and his waiting wife 
under the influence of liquor. 

While we are dealing with words, let us look a 
moment at the word " perfect " itself. It means 
simply the " finished " thing. It comes from the 
Latin, and consists of two words which are most 
easily and literally translated " through " and 
" do." The " perfect " life, therefore, is that which 



IS HAPPINESS THE GEEATEST GOOD ? 55 

is " thoroughly done," or " done through ; " the im- 
perfect life is the " half-baked " life. Why should 
any one wish to live such a life ? Or why should 
it be thought that the whitish pallor of the half- 
done loaf, as compared with the golden brown ap- 
pearance of the perfectly baked bread just from 
the oven, argues against happiness as the accom- 
paniment of perfection ? The color on the loaf 
that marks its perfection is the color that is most 
pleasing to the eye, even as the smell is most 
pleasing to the nostril. And the pleasure that 
goes with genuine moral perfection is the tint that 
is truest to the genius of happiness. 

Keal goodness has always, to use old Scripture 
phraseology, " a sweet-smelling savor." The man 
who thinks of happiness and perfection as incon- 
sistent does not know either of them as he should. 
Perfectness and pleasantness are never far apart. 
To think of life in terms of perfection is to fill 
both the reality and the ideal with abundance of 
joy. It is only the fun and frolic and amusement 
that fit in with the consciousness of a perfect pur- 
pose and a purpose of perfectness that a,re fun and 
frolic and amusement indeed. If you cannot 
laugh for God, and with the thought of God in 
your mind, you have either a very mistaken notion 
of God or a very unhealthful idea of laughter. 
You need to get rid of both. 

All that God wants of you is your good, and 
the world's good. What is there to make you 



56 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

melanclioly, " bilious " in a word, about that as an 
ideal of life ? Would you have him want less ? 
Would you want less yourself ? Is there a simpler 
or a safer guide to the happiness that will not 
leave you with a " dark brown taste in your 
mouth " than the pole-star of this one illuminating 
purpose, — to " make good " in everything you do ? 
What amusement do you want that is an abuse- 
ment either of your own self or of others ? The 
commonest word for sin in the Bible means pri- 
marily a " failing to hit the mark." Where is the 
" fun " in that ? Take the light otk.of delight and 
what have you left ? Fanciful, yoix'^j.'. Perhaps 
so, judged superficiall}'". But this is not fanciful ; 
— that when a man once gets a true sense of where 
he is going in life, he has a new song on his lips, 
and can play with a lightsomeness of heart which 
he never before knew. 

Tears ago some boys gathered one winter morn- 
ing around the " Liberty Pole " in the center of a 
"common" in an eastern town. One of them 
suggested to the rest that they try to see which 
could make the straightest path through the snow 
to the common's edge. When they compared re- 
sults, all the paths were found to zigzag a good 
deal, except one. They asked the boy who had 
made it, " How did you do it, Freddy ? " " Aw, 
it was easy enough," he replied. " You see that 
tree? Well, I just fixed my eyes on it, and 
walked straight toward it," The other boys had 



IS HAPPINESS THE GEEATEST GOOD 1 57 



looked at everything and hence at nothing, or elsa 
they had looked at their feet. 

The straight life is the definite life, aAd/the 
straight path even to happiness is the palji that 
has a fixed goal at the end. ^o man is ready to 
be amused who has not a measurement for his 
amusements big enough to take in the whole of 
life. Before you go anywhere for fun, you need 
to know where it is that you and the world are 
going in earnest. If you get your bearings right, 
it will not lessen your merriment, or decrease 
your delights. You can dance on deck with all 
the more assurance when you have seen the com- 
pass and know you are in accord with the stars. 
Get acquainted with the ideal of perfection, and 
you will find happiness exceedingly anxious on her 
part to get better acquainted with you. 




CHAPTEE V 
" WHO'S WHO " IN MOEALS? 

A YOUNG woman in Seattle was talking with 
the pastor of the church which she attended. He 
was urging upon her the duty and the opportunity 
of the Christian life. She was reserved and eva- 
sive. At length, encouraged by the openness of 
his manner and the urgency of his argument, she 
made this confession, " I suppose I ought to be a 
Christian, but I love to dance, and I do not believe 
that a church member ought to dance." 

The minister was only a little older than the 
girl with whom he talked. He had never danced, 
and dancing had never particularly appealed to 
him. In this instance he made the mistake of 
trying to argue with the girl on her own ground, 
instead of standing on the ground of his first in- 
sistence, which was the claim of the Christian 
life. He talked with her about dancing, instead 
of talking about life itself. He could not confute 
her, and he only confused himself. 'Not until 
afterward did he clearly see that much more than 
dancing was involved. 

There may be room for direct argument con- 
58 



" WHO'S WHO " IN MOEALS ? 59 

cerning the question as to whether dancing is 
good or bad. To this question we shall come a 
little later in the course of this discussion. But 
the girl put the question where many people put 
it, and just where it does not belong. If there 
is any issue at all about dancing, the issue is not 
whether a church member ought, or ought not, to 
dance ; it is whether any one can dance and keep 
step with the harmony of life itself. 

The prime mistake of this young woman, which 
the young minister was not at the time quick 
enough to see, was in the supposition that there is 
one moral standard for church members and 
another moral standard for those who are not 
members of a church. The mistake is common, 
very common, indeed, although not always as 
naively stated. There are many of maturer 
years who are ready to maintain with regard to 
much larger issues that the moral obligation is 
not one and the same for all men and women, 
but that duty depends, to a great degree, upon 
situation and profession. 

To be all that each of us can be, and to help 
others to realize themselves individually and 
collectively, is an objective which cannot recog- 
nize any excuse that will allow any one to slip 
out. Whether or not we have the right to do 
this thing or that, is not conditioned by sex, or by 
profession, or by any incident of situation, but 
fundamentally by its relation to life itself. Does 



60 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

it help you to live f Does it make more effecti/oe 
or less effective your helpfulness in relation to other 
lives f These are the issues, and the only issues, 
whether you are man or woman, church-member 
or outside the church, Pharisee or publican, bond 
or free. Anything is right for any one which 
makes good in terms of life. IS^othing is right 
for any one which does not make good in terms 
of life. To live to the utmost is an obligation 
resting equally upon all, whether the obligation 
is admitted or not. The moral law is one, and 
there are none who are specially privileged or 
exempt. 

The purpose of play is the enrichment and the 
enlargement of life. Any play which accomplishes 
this end is good for any one at any time. Any 
play which makes against a larger and a richer 
life is wrong for every one, and everywhere. 'Bo 
amusement is wrong which helps us to live more 
effectively. Ko amusement is right which hinders 
the effective life. The law is simple, and it is one 
and invariable for all. 

There is a popular impression that a minister 
ought to be a better man than other men. But 
even our human laws do not recognize either lesser 
or greater guilt with respect to a minister's rela- 
.tion to what the law defines as crime. A murder 
committed by a minister may cause more public 
scandal, but the courts treat the offense, if proved, 
exactly the same. He is a murderer because he is 



" WHO'S WHO " IN MOEALS ^ 61 

a responsible moral being, not because he is a 
minister, nor yet because as to sex he is a man. 
Wherein we fall short of this moral equality 
before the law the failure is sentimental and not 
legal ; it has to do with the defective pursuit of 
our ideals, and not with the ideals themselves. 
Crime is crime whether the criminal is a church- 
member or not. 

And play is play for the same fundamental 
cause, that the criterion of conduct is its relation 
to life itself. " To be or not to be, that is the 
question," and, from the standpoint of morals, 
being means vastly more than the continuance or 
non-continuance of life in the body, or even exist- 
ence itself. It means to be true to the ends of 
existence, to be worthy of life's ultimate purpose, 
to be in the way of perfecting oneself and the 
whole social order of which we are necessarily a 
part. There is no legitimate amusement for any 
one which is not legitimatized by the judgment 
of life itself, by whether it fulfils that for which 
life is. 

It is good to state this over and over, because 
the principle has been, and is, so much overlaid 
and obscured. With all our emphasizing of it, 
there will be many who will not want to meas- 
ure amusements in the light of this illuminating 
principle, but will still darken counsel with all 
sorts of individual evasions and conceits. We do 
this continually, not only with reference to issues 



62 LATJGHTEE AND LIFE 

of fun and laughter and play, but with respect to 
what we very dubiously term the more serious 
concerns of life. There is really only one serious 
concern in life, and that is to live, to live indeed. 
All things bear upon this, and therefore all things 
are serious in the right sense of that word. 
Laughter may, on occasion and in particular 
situations, be more effective than toil in perfect- 
ing life in relation to its deepest purpose. Work 
may be as indifferently successful as play. But 
work and play are both but tools, and the man 
himself is the end. And when we think of the 
man himself as the end, — the man as an individ- 
ual, and the man as a social factor, — both play 
and work are brought to one and the same judg- 
ment-bar, and the law by which they are judged 
is so simple that even a child may understand. 

Does it help youf Does it help you to help 
others? These are the testing acids, whether 
you apply them to the work side of life, or to 
the other side, which we call amusement or play. 
In regard to both of these there may appear to 
be room for considerations of sex and circum- 
stance and situation, but it will be found, upon 
closer examination, that the law is actually one 
and the same for all. 

It may be granted that moral innocence or 
guilt is, in a measure, relative to moral con- 
sciousness and sensibility. The thing that I feel 
is wrong is made more wrong for me to the eX- 



** WHO'S WHO " IK MOEALS ? 63 

tent that I violate my conscience in doing it, 
whether it is wrong objectively and universally 
or not. Yet even here the test is essentially one, 
— the relation of the act to the perfecting of 
life. 

The good or evil of each particular act of work 
or play must be measured finally by its actual re- 
sults, and not by our feeling about it, just as the 
value of our food depends ultimately, not upon 
how it tastes to us, but upon how it digests and 
assimilates in the body. Palatableness may have 
to be considered, but it is not the first or the fore- 
most consideration. There are medicines that are 
bad to take, and poisons that the corrupted appe- 
tite craves with a terrible craving. So likewise 
there are things we dislike to do which act like 
a tonic upon the moral nature, and there are in- 
dulgences of various sorts that we crave, — usually 
in the measure of our surrender to them, — which 
are enervating and destructive in a high degree. 
The theory that things are right or wrong ac- 
cording to our thought of them, falls down when 
it is given a long enough test, so that actual ten- 
dencies and effects have a chance to work them- 
selves out. 

The judgments of conscience are based largely 
upon custom and education. That which we are 
accustomed to do we are prone to think is right 
to do. Do anything long enough, and you will 
find some way of justifying it to yourself. This 



64 LAUGHTER AND LIFE 

it is which explains Alexander Pope's famous 
verse : 

" Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, 
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen ; 
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, 
We first endure, then pity, then embrace." 

Men have been known to observe their devo- 
tions with conscientious regularity and sincere 
enjoyment while in charge of slave-ships in the 
holds of which were huddled hundreds of human 
beings in the most abject misery and want, with 
never a thought apparently that there was any- 
thing to disturb the conscience in the situation. 
"Whether it concerns the work side of life or the 
play side of life, an uninstructed conscience is a 
most unreliable guide. It is not what we think 
right that is right, but only that which works out 
righteousness. Any other standard is likely to 
lead to the justification of the worst things that 
men and women can do. 

ISTor is the issue of influence determinative of 
right and wrong any more than are the judg- 
ments of conscience. The notion that some men 
and women can act with greater moral freedom 
because they have less responsibility toward their 
fellows is a very deceptive and dangerous kind of 
reasoning. A thing is not right for you because 
you have a less instructed conscience than your 
fellows, though the measure of your guilt in 
doing it may be affected thereby, if you act 



"WHO'S WHO" IN MOEALS? 65 

against what you feel to be the right, l^or is a 
thing right for you because you think yourself 
less accountable to others than some one else. 
The reach of influence is not to be measured by 
any instruments which we have. 

" Ours is the seed-time, God alone 
Beholds the end of what is sown ; 
Beyond our vision, weak and dim, 
The harvest-time is hid with him." 

Nature treats with equal justice those who 
make mistakes, whether they make them unwit- 
tingly or not. There are no aristocrats in the 
courts of natural law. The captain who drives 
his ship onto the rocks by a misreading of his 
compass is engulfed quite as remorselessly as the 
captain who plays the fool and does not care 
what his compass says. The fool who does right 
gets the benefit of it, and the wise man who does 
wrong gets the harm. There are no favorites at 
the bar of God, and no man makes or unmakes 
the laws of the universe to suit himself. 

With equal impartiality does nature weigh the 
influences of men. JSTo man can do good or evil 
to himself alone. The radiation goes forth, and 
no one is in position to measure the relative im- 
portance of this or that man's life to the universe. 
The mother of many children may seem to be in 
a position where her acts and words are of more 
consequence than the sayings and doings of the 



ae liAlTGHTEB AND LIFE 

solitary woman who knows neither kith nor kin, 
but the measurement of their influence only God 
understands. 

Here is Elizabeth Clephane, an obscure Scotch 
lassie, who dies in her youth, and apparently 
leaves no influence of consequence behind her. 
And then comes the hurrying American evan- 
gelist and his singing companion, and at a rail- 
way station the singer chances to get a copy of a 
newspaper with a few lines of verse in it written 
by the dead girl years before. There is a great 
meeting of many thousands in another city; a 
mighty sermon by the mighty evangelist, then at 
the height of his power ; and an instant demand 
for some song that shall voice the spirit of the 
thousands who are there hungering for God as 
they have never hungered for him before. The 
evangelist hesitates ; then draws from his pocket 
the obscure verses of the obscure writer which he 
has clipped from the obscure paper, sets them 
before him on the organ, and begins to play. 
And God gives his music wings, and the simple 
Scotch girl's rendering of the marvelous parable 
of the Master carries all over the world the pas- 
sion of the One who left the " ninety and nine " 
to seek the sheep that was lost, in accents that 
are still living, though both evangelist and singer 
are gone. 

'Now you may say that such survivals of in- 
fluence are very rare; that such immortality as 



''WHO'S WHO" IN MOEALS? 67 

came to Elizabeth Clephane does not happen to 
those of like obscurity and humble gifts once in a 
thousand years. And what if it is so? How 
many of the stars that stud the heavens do you 
actually see, and what do you know, by the casual 
vision of the natural eye, as to their relative size 
and brilliancy ? And even if you can affirm their 
magnitude, and measure in relative terms the in- 
tensity of their light, what do you know of the 
part which they play in the scheme of the uni- 
verse ? There are those who call ours the " sor- 
rowing star." Others, who speak more scientif- 
ically, describe in terms of inferiority the place of 
the earth even in our own solar system, and do 
not hesitate to say that it is but an inconspicuous 
speck in the totality of the universe. Yet be it 
or be it not the " sorrowing " planet among God's 
worlds, and be it ever so small as compared with 
others whose light hardly touches our night with 
even a pin-point of radiance, it is not possible for 
any one to measure the majesty arid significance 
of the divine operations here. It may be that 
our planet is a veritable field of Waterloo in the 
mighty contest of right and wrong on the broad 
and illimitable areas of the seen and the unseen. 

And if we may not measure the significance of 
our world among the multitudes of other worlds, 
who shall assume to measure the significance of 
any man among his fellows ? " There are last 
who shaU be first, and there are first who shall 



68 LA.UGHTER AND LIFE 

be last," was one of the profound paradoxes of 
Jesus. And again, " I say unto you, that many 
shall come from the east and the west, and shall 
sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in 
the kingdom of heaven ; but the sons of the 
kingdom shall be cast forth into the outer dark- 
ness." Still further Jesus said to the prominent 
religious leaders of his day, those who reckoned 
themselves, and were reckoned, as the men of 
chief influence, " Verily I say unto you, that the 
publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of 
God before you." Who shall say that influence 
is in proportion to prominence and acceptance 
among men to-day ? 

No, God is not publishing any " Who's Who " 
in morals. 'No man knows his place in the uni- 
verse, or the measure of what he does or fails to 
do. A man is bound, not only for what he is, 
but for what he ought to be, and to this one man 
is bound as much as another. His conscience 
is but the chart of the sea over which he sails. 
It may be right or it may be wrong with respect 
to this or to that part of the course which he 
takes. But the sea exists in fact, not on his chart 
alone ; and the judgment of how and whither he 
goes is, finally, not the judgment of what he thinks 
about it, but of how his thinking accords with 
eternal fact. He sails not alone, but in the midst 
of a vast company. Whether he is leader or fol- 
lower he himself hardly knows. Who shall be 



"WHO'S WHO" IN MOEALS? 69 

affected by his successes and his failures only eter- 
nity itself can tell. He has no more right to 
reckon his life of less consequence than another's 
than he has to reckon it of more. It is his trust, 
to be carried out as sacredly on his part as the 
trust of any other soul. Where he is, or what he 
is as to his circumstances, or what his professions 
may be, are all minor matters, of importance only 
as they help or hinder him in realizing the end of 
life itself. 

In the church or out of the church, ac- 
knowledging openly the lordship of Jesus or 
knowing nothing of such acknowledgment and 
lordship, the obligation is one and invariable in 
its abiding and eternal aspects. And it is noth- 
ing less than this for one and all, to live life to the 
utmost^ and to do only those things which make for 
the enlargement and enrichment of life. Get this 
rule once firmly fixed in your faith and you will 
find it a compass indeed, more to be depended 
upon than any excusing judgments of what seems 
right or wrong in the imperfect light of to-day, 
or what may be the measure of our sway, as 
compared with that of others, over the lives and 
destinies of our fellow-men. The best man's 
conscience is his, only to be made better every 
day. The poorest man's influence is immeasur- 
ably beyond his own estimate of it as it stands, 
and an illimitable increase of it lies every hour 
within his reach. There is one law for all, the 



70 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

law of perfect living, and that one law holds 
within it possibilities of one eternal destiny which 
only the mind that can measure God himself is 
able to determine. 



CHAPTEE VI 
"AND WHO IS MY NEIGHBOE?" 

If life were mainly a matter of acquiring a right 
theory and then of carrying it out in an orderly, 
logical way, the pathway of pleasure, as we have 
traced it, would now seem to be plain enough. 
"We would need only to recognize the seriousness 
of laughter, the consent of Jesus to a wholesome 
sort of fun, the large function of natural play as a 
part of the building process of life, and the equal 
and invariable obligation of all to make amusement, 
as well as the more laborious employments of life, 
contribute to the real purpose for which we are 
here, — the perfecting of ourselves and of others. 
Having done this, we might measure out our 
laughter as a man calculates the yield of his corn- 
fields, or bids on the contract for the building of a 
house. 

The suggestion is more amusing than our amuse- 
ments themselves would be likely to prove if we 
went at them in this wooden way. Life is a good 
deal more than logic, and laughter is the most 
spontaneous side of life. Moreover, our amuse- 
ments reflect our environment much more than 

71 



72 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

they embody our reflections. Logic has about as 
much to do with laughter as deliberate intention 
has to do with the beating of the heart. Never- 
theless, the heart may be kept healthy enough to 
go on with its labor more effectively, if not less 
unconsciously, by taking thought for one's life 
after a right fashion. And there is a taking 
thought for one's laughter which is wholly con- 
sistent with the spontaneity of fun, by which 
laughter is likely to last longer and to circulate 
with more freedom and power, 

" Out of the heart are the issues of life," is as 
true as when it was first written down centuries 
ago. The emphasis of the inner, individual life is 
valid for all time. But we know, better than our 
fathers knew, the relation of the heart to the other 
organs of the body. And we feel, more than our 
fathers felt, the dependence of the individual upon 
the environment in the midst of which he lives. 
'No intelligent man can think of his amusements 
now without taking into account the order of the 
world about him, which increasingly shapes his 
own life, whether he works or plays. If we are 
going to laugh unto God to-day we shall have to 
reckon on a great deal more than our own will in 
the matter. 

Laughter has always been a social habit. It is 
not normal for a man to laugh alone. Solitary 
laughter is, generally speaking, the laughter of the 
insane, — more terrible than tears. Men almost 



"AND WHO IS MY NEIGHBOE?" 73 

invariably get together when they want amuse- 
ment. Etymologically, amusement is the opposite 
of musing. Men muse alone, but commonly they 
are amused only when they get together. And 
it is the character of their getting together, much 
more than the manner of their private musing, 
that fixes the forms and gives direction to the in- 
fluence of their play. 

The thing that is most influential with respect 
to popular amusements to-day is not that we have 
thought out the logic of laughter more clearly 
than our fathers did, or that we are more Chris- 
tian in our individual thinking about it. It is the 
changed and changing character of our social con- 
tacts that has most to do with the fact that, on the 
whole, we are taking play more seriously, and are 
more inclined to conform it to Christian standards 
and ideals. Our circumstances are shaping our 
thoughts quite as much as our thoughts are shap- 
ing our circumstances. 

To what extent the modification of the manner 
of the world's work has, within the last few hun- 
dred years, modified the manner of the world's 
play, very few people yet realize. The modern 
world is no more different from the world of the 
Middle Ages, with respect to letters or commerce, 
than it is with respect to play. The discovery of 
America has chiefly been thought of in the past as 
an intellectual achievement. It is now much more 
recognized as a commercial effect and cause. But 



74 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

it has been hardly less revolutionary in relation to 
the pleasure life of the world than with regard to 
business. Our play life has not been less modified 
than have our profits or our philosophies by the 
adventurous voyage of Columbus four centuries 
ago. 

Nor has the development of machinery within 
the last one hundred years had more to do with 
the making and the unmaking of fortunes than it 
has had to do with the making and the unmaking 
of fun. Our inventions would not astonish our 
fathers of the period of the Revolutionary "War 
more than would many of our sports and pastimes, 
and especially the lighter moods of the modern 
man. There will be occasion later to speak of 
this more at length, but nothing is more unlike the 
life of two centuries ago in England than the 
changed attitude, among Christians and church- 
members particularly, toward a cheerful and op- 
timistic conception of life. Some of thie most 
devout expressions of old-time seriousness move us 
to irrepressible smiles to-day. 

It is quite too much to claim that the change 
has been altogether good. This is very far from 
being the fact. Our attitude toward life is prob- 
ably more healthful as a whole, and in the 
realm of religion there is very much less of the 
morbid and the unreal, but at many points prog- 
ress has been at the cost of simplicity and 
disinterestedness. Kowhere is this change for 



<*AND WHO IS MY NEIGHBOE?" 75 

the worse more manifest than it is in the realm of 
sport. 

The writer from whom we quoted a while ago, 
Joseph Lee, in the same article from which we 
took a sentence or two concerning the natural 
function of play, speaks more at length and very 
illuminatingly as to certain aspects of this contrast 
between the play life of our ancestors and our 
own, and also regarding some of the manifest 
causes which have seriously modified our inherit- 
ance of play. He says in part : 

" The life led by our ancestors, which molded 
their customs and traditions in play as in all other 
respects, was for thousands of years a life in small 
village communities. ... In this ancient 
tribal and village life, people lived near enough 
together to meet for purposes of defense, of gov- 
ernment, and of recreation, and yet were not so 
crowded but that there was room for every sort 
of play and game. 

" Under the conditions of our modern life, how- 
ever, the introduction of machinery and other 
improvements into the art of agriculture has had 
the double effect of greatly enlarging our farms 
and thereby rendering our population far more 
sparse, and of making possible the enormous 
growth and crowding of our cities. The result 
has been the suffocation on the one hand, and the 
attenuation, almost to the point of disappearance, 
on the other, of much of our recreational and 
social life. You can play baseball with a base 
ninety feet long ; you can play it fairly well with 
one of half that length ; but you cannot play it 



76 LAUGHTER AND LIFE 

when the distance is less than three feet or more 
than a mile. And something the same is true of 
other games. 

" Immigration, the other cause of danger to our 
recreational life, has hitherto had a curiously ster- 
ilizing effect. The immigrant has not brought 
his own games with him, and, except for base- 
ball, crap-shooting, and marbles, seems to absorb 
very little of our American tradition. 

" These three influences, — the crowding of the 
city, the loneliness of the country, and unlimited 
alien immigration, — have had a most serious ef- 
fect upon all our institutions ; but nowhere is 
this effect more clearly shown than in the loss or 
lessened vogue of many of our ancient games. 
Never before, probably, has a nation been threat- 
ened with a loss of its play tradition. And such 
a loss would be almost an irreparable one. . . . 
It would be almost as serious as the loss of the 
tradition of oral speech or of the great legal and 
constitutional methods which the ages have grad- 
ually evolved. For life can no more go on with- 
out play than it can without language or without 
laws." 

The three factors here named meet us on the 
very threshold of any far-seeing consideration of 
the social aspects of the problem of play. The 
changed conditions of agriculture, the growth of 
great cities, and the intermixture of a multitude 
of strange peoples, — these have had more to do, 
and are more influential to-day, in determining 
the character of our amusements and the whole - 
someness or unwholesomeness of our laughter 



"AND WHO IS MY NEIGHBOE?" 77 

than any amount of reasoning concerning the 
seriousness of sport, or the teachings of moral 
philosophy as to its primary purpose. We ac- 
tually do play, not as we think we ought to play, 
not as we think Jesus would have played, not as 
nature indicates we were made to play, and not 
out of a sense of a definite, common, moral in- 
tention ; but we play as our playmates play, as 
our neighbors and friends play, as the age in 
which we live gives us the chance and the choice 
of play. And neither chance nor choice is for 
most of us what it ought to be to-day. 

It is said on the authority of one who has 
specialized on the folklore of play that up to the 
middle of the last century we had a richer play 
tradition than any other country, owing appar- 
ently to the fact that for two centuries we had 
been more out of the current of contemporary 
events than other countries, and so had remained 
more primitive and unsophisticated. The America 
of that time was, in some ways, a piece of the 
England of Elizabeth, isolated and preserved as 
such. 

Up to the time of which we have spoken, the 
games played by American children Avere appar- 
ently much the same all over the country, going 
back as they did to a common origin in England 
before the streams of our early immigration sepa- 
rated. And the play tradition was as strong in 
Puritan New England as in the South or in the 



78 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

Middle States. In its origin, this play tradition 
was much older than England. It was European 
rather than English, and undoubtedly went back 
beyond that to the play of ancestors yet farther 
removed. 

The game, " Oats, pease, beans, and barley 
grow," is said to have been played by Froissart 
and Rabelais, and is still a favorite in France, in- 
cluding Provence, as well as in Spain, Italy, 
Sicily, Germany, and Sweden, " Hop Scotch " 
has no such local origin as its name appears to 
imply, but seems to be a nearly universal game, 
its range being from England to Hindustan. In 
Austria the final goal in this game was called 
the " temple ; " in Italy the last three divisions 
are the inferno^ jpurgatorio^ and paradiso. 
" Jackstones " is said to be of Japanese origin, but 
seems to have circled the earth, as America re- 
ceived the game from both East and West. 

Much more might be given, as recited by this 
writer (Newell) or by Lee and others after them, 
concerning the notable antiquity of many of our 
simplest and most familiar sports. " Horace tells 
how, on the famous journey to Brundisium, Mae- 
cenas went out and played tennis while he and 
Vergil were kept in the house, one by a weak 
stomach and the other by weak eyes. Aristotle 
recommends ' the rattle of Archimedes ' for chil- 
dren of about the age of six. Dolls are found in 
the catacombs of Egypt, and ball-games go back 



"AND WHO IS MY NEIGHBOE?" 79 

at least as far as Nausicaa and Atalanta. (The 
latter, to be sure, on the occasion most generally 
remembered, was not engaged in ball, but in track 
athletics; but the fact that she stopped in the 
middle of an important sprint to chase after a 
ball, is more significant than if she had brought 
in the winning ran for Thebes.) The Eoman 
girls used to play ball, and children's balls were 
made with a rattle inside, and with gaudily col- 
ored lobes, as they are to-day. Ball seems to 
have been especially a game for girls during the 
Middle Ages, and is mentioned as such by Walter 
von der Yogelweide." 

Many sports were of ancient religious origin. 
"London Bridge," which we know only as an 
old-fashioned child's game, is supposed to have 
represented long ago the perpetual warfare of 
good and bad spirits over departed souls. " The 
special relation between bridges and the enemy 
of mankind long antedates ' bridge whist.' There 
are ' Devil's Bridges ' in all parts of Europe. 
The devil in those traditions represents the an- 
cient spirit of the land, who resented the pre- 
sumption of man in making safe roads across his 
streams to rob him of his natural toll of deaths 
by drowning, and sought revenge. In conse- 
quence, he always did his best to destroy the 
bridge, and very frequently succeeded. In order 
to make it stand firm and sure, he had to be pro- 
pitiated, and there are many stories of compacts 



80 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

between the architect and his infernal majesty, 
under which the latter was entitled to the soul 
of the first person passing over the bridge, — 
though he was generally cheated out of it by 
various infantile devices which he never seemed 
able to anticipate. That is why London Bridge 
is forever falling down, why the children who 
cross it are continually being caught, and why 
the game finally ends in the tug of war (between 
good and evil spirits) to settle their ultimate des- 
tination." 

These things are of more than curious or idle 
interest. They indicate the manner of life out of 
which came most of our simpler and older forms 
of merrymaking. Much that belonged to that 
life in the way of fear-inspiring and whimsical 
religious ideas has happily passed away. But 
there was much also of intimate and homelike 
neighborhood life which we have left behind to 
our loss, and for which the present age has sub- 
stituted conditions and types of play that are far 
less favorable to amusement of a healthful kind. 
The May-poles of old England, which our Puri- 
tan fathers frowned down, were innocent indeed 
as compared with much of the hectic sensational- 
ism of our modern " white cities " and brilliantly 
illuminated " pleasure " resorts. 

To recognize these facts is not to maintain for 
a moment that the personal ideal of a pure and 
purposeful pleasure life is vain. But the ideal is 



''AND WHO IS MY NEIGHBOE?" 81 

first. Well does Mrs. Browning say, apropos of 
work: 

" We must be here to work, and men who work 
Can only work for men ; and not to work in vain 
Must understand humanity, and so work humanly, 
And raise men's bodies still by raising souls. 
As God did first." 

So also with respect to play is the ideal, as it 
stands in this argument, first. There is nothing 
to be said concerning the importance of environ- 
ment, either in relation to work or to play, which 
does not call for a first insistence npon right 
thinking and right willing in the individual life. 
We shall raise the " bodies " of our amusements 
" still by raising souls ; " that is, whatever forms 
the pleasure life of the new order may take, the 
redemption of our pleasures outwardly must come 
through the transformation of inward purpose, 
through fellowship with the divine in our think- 
ing and feeling. 

But though we have touched the social side of 
the question only incidentally, it must be evident 
at once that we are not going to save our amuse- 
ments merely by trying to save ourselves. Play 
is much more than a personal matter. It has 
become, in this generation, much more than a 
neighborhood matter. Over against the fact that 
life is one, stands this other fact, — that the world 
is one to-day as it has never been before. Our 
industrial problem is largely a world problem. 



82 LAUGHTER AND LIFE 

and it is the breaking down of the barriers be- 
tween the world's workers that constitutes the 
most serious aspect of the problem to-day. There 
is revolution in it, revolution more serious, though, 
as we hope, far less sanguinary, than have been 
some of the revolutions of modern times. And 
there is revolution also in the breaking down of 
the barriers between those who play, and in the 
passing of those conditions which have hitherto 
given form to the play life of the world. If 
there were nothing more serious in the situation 
than the items already cited, these things should 
be enough to " give us pause." The old-fashioned 
country neighborhood is passing, or has passed. 
The masses are caught in the terrific turmoil of 
our great cities. People who were born to differ- 
ent languages, who represent different racial ex- 
periences, and who champion more or less con- 
flicting religious convictions are brought together 
from all the ends of the earth. And these often 
find it more difficult to play together than they 
do to work together. 

These things are merely the surface of the 
problem, as will shortly be seen ; but to see even 
these superficial facts is to realize that we must 
measure our amusements by something more than 
monastic ideals of separation and abstinence, per- 
sonal proprieties, or the rules and respectabilities 
of our own particular group. We must prepare 
ourselves to recognize as frankly the question, 



''AND WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR?" 83 

"Who is my neighbor?" as we have faced 
frankly the other inquiry, "Who's who before 
the moral law ? " 

If we were simply destroying one another's 
play by the new world which we are making, 
the matter would be serious enough, as the writer 
from whom we have so freely quoted has said. 
To cease playing altogether would be a calamity 
for the race that no words can exaggerate. But 
we are in no danger of this. The play instinct is 
too universal and too irrepressible to be extin- 
guished by any or all of the devices of modern 
life. The danger is not of extinction ; it is of an 
inferior and mischievous substitution. There are 
forces at work, not yet touched upon, that tend 
to create ideas and appetites with regard to 
amusement more harmful than the worst of the 
superstitions out of which came the old games 
and gambolings. Our modern heathenism shows 
itself at its worst at the point where it seeks to 
control the world's laughter and conform it to its 
own hard and yellow image. 

Every thoughtful father and mother to-day must 
face with seriousness the question as to the kind 
of children with whom their own children should 
play. The common school makes for a democracy 
of fellowship which, allowing to the full for all 
that can be said for it, is fraught with no small 
amount of danger. Our children are no longer 
our own, but they belong to the world. Parents 



84 LAUGHTER AND LIFE 

with "whom we cannot talk, because they know 
hardly a word of our native tongue, and with 
whom we would hardly know how to talk if the 
barrier of unintelligible accents, which lies like a 
great gulf between us, were bridged by some prac- 
ticable world language, because we have so little 
in common with their associations and ideas, are 
nevertheless both progenitors and educators, in 
large part, of the plastic lives of children whose 
shaping is going to affect more or less the lives of 
our own boys and girls. Other lands are furnish- 
ing the other half of the parentage of our grand- 
children. Those who have prattled upon our 
breasts will hear their own little ones prattle upon 
breasts that have been nurtured on the milk of 
civilizations wholly foreign to our own. The very 
rag-time in which we sing, " Stay in your own 
back-yard," is its own token to us, if we are able 
to read between the lines, as to how impossible it 
is now to keep the world even that far removed 
from the door-steps where our children play. The 
fences are all going down, and back-yard and 
front-yard are all merged in one common street 
to-day. 

The problem grows only more difficult when the 
youth has succeeded to the child. It is still possi- 
ble to have a measure of isolation for the boy or 
girl, or, what is better far than isolation, a meas- 
ure of safe and sound companionship, but the pos- 
sibility becomes rapidly less as he grows. It is not 



"AND WHO IS MY NEIGHBOE? " 85 

merely that the school claims him, and that there 
he finds his fellows from all the ends of the earth. 
More insistent than the school in its perilous dis- 
regard of the privacies which we have tried to 
hold fast, is the great city. It scorns all our sanc- 
tities, and derides all our decencies, if need be, 
for the sake of its factories, which must have 
" hands " at the price of almost any cost in souls. 
And more scornful of our anxieties and timidities 
than the shop, harder by far than the face of the 
most rigorous foreman beside the lathe where our 
lad goes to get his livelihood and his trade, is the 
pleasure world of the big town which recks noth- 
ing of what we have labored to teach the boy or 
the girl concerning the permissible and the non- 
permissible in play. However we may have 
guided the child's laughter until this time, so that 
both he and ourselves might indeed laugh unto 
God, the pleasure life of our modern metropolis 
reaches for him with a vehemence and a vicious- 
ness that too often make his later laughter a fear- 
ful mockery of our wisdom and our prayers, and 
a just occasion for almost unrelievable tears. 

This is the fact that stands forth against all our 
talk of fun to-day; — that, guard it as we will 
in order that the frolic of our own flesh and blood 
may be pure and abiding, our neighbors may have 
more to do with the outcome than ourselves. "We 
cannot save our own babies to-day except as we 
save our neighbors' babies. We may think to do 



86 LAUGHTER AND LIFE 

so by keeping them apart while they romp and 
play the ancient pastimes of our race as children. 
We may accomplish such separation even later 
when they find their place in the world's work. 
But the whole play life of the modern city is 
against us. The world of laughter is one neigh- 
borhood now, vastly more than the world of 
thought or the world of work. And only as this 
one neighborhood is dominated by the sense of 
one life worth living, one standard of pure pur- 
pose whether at work or at play, one moral philos- 
ophy that makes God first even in our fun, only so 
will our own laughter he saved to a sure service of 
this ideal. 

It is in vain that we talk of amusements from 
the standpoint of ourselves alone. To try to treat 
amusements in a non-social way is as futile as 
to attempt to deal with them in a merely incidental 
way. They are as much more than individual as 
they are more than incidental. Our play is em- 
phatically part of life itself, and it is part, not only 
of our own life, but of the life of the world. In 
industry we are beginning to see that a man's job 
is more than a way of getting a living ; it is his 
life, — worthy work only as it is an expression of 
himself. So it is with play. Eeal play is an ex- 
pression of the real man. But this is not all. We 
are seeing also that, so far as work is concerned, a 
man cannot keep his own job what it ought to be 
except as he keeps the other man's job what it 



"AND WHO IS MY NEIGHB0E1" 87 

ought to be. To save his own labor he must save 
the toil of his fellows. He must protect them, 
must educate them, — in a word, he must save them 
if he would not be lost himself. 

Is it any less so with respect to fun ? Has this 
modern world made of our industries one work- 
bench even as much as it has made of our amuse- 
ments one theater and one stage? Always the 
world has been playing common games, more than 
it has been doing common work. The work is 
one to-day, but the play is one to an even greater 
degree. And, because it is one, we can save it to 
the one common meaning and end of life for us 
all only as we address ourselves to save our neigh- 
bor with the same zeal with which we seek to save 
ourselves. 



CHAPTEE YII 
THE EXPLOITATION OF FUN 

The man who "went down from Jerusalem 
to Jericho " twenty centuries ago " fell among 
thieves," who " stripped him of his raiment, and 
wounded him, and departed, leaving him half 
dead." 

In Jesus' parable the tragic story of that road- 
way is passed with this one brief, illuminating 
reference. It is a lightning flash which shows in 
an instant a whole landscape with startling vivid- 
ness. The story deals in the same illuminating 
way with the incidents of the man's deliverance. 
The priest and the Levite are both flashed upon 
the canvas of history as swiftly and inexorably as 
the entomologist impales an insect upon his screen. 
Over against the exhibit of their unconcern and 
incapacity is set in suggestive relief the fine figure 
of the unnamed Samaritan, who is, to all time, a 
token of what real neighborliness means, and of 
the unexpected places in which it may often be 
found. 

The story is marvelously well adapted to illus- 
trate the world of amusement as we find it to-day. 
There is no need to insist upon the analogy in 
detail; the main outlines of the comparison are 

88 



THE EXPLOITATION OF FUN 89 

so obvious that they do not have to be forced. 
One need not go veiy far in his observation of the 
many highways of modern pleasure life to find 
the man who has been robbed. He is to be found 
altogether too easily, stripped of his raiment, 
wounded, and half-dead. Indeed, this is a mild 
description of the disaster which has fallen upon 
a multitude of the brightest and best in our time, 
on the swift descent into the world of " fun." 

Nor do the priest and the Levite fare very 
much better when the comparison is continued. 
When not indifferent to the sore straits of those 
who have been unspeakably despoiled, their inca- 
pacity to-day even more than of old is a scandal 
to religion. Looking at the matter in a large 
way, and with earnest endeavor not to be more 
severe than Jesus was, the candid commentator 
on the present situation is compelled to admit 
that so far our religious forces have not been very 
effective either in staying the exploitation, or in 
relieving those who have been exploited. It is to 
be feared that the Samaritan, that is, the man of 
the world, is often more effective in bringing suc- 
cor and redress than many a man whose religious 
spirit is good, but who, by reason either of inertia, 
or of inaptness of thought, goes by ineffectively 
"on the other side." 

How common the robbery is We know in a 
general way, but we are far from having faced 
the facts with unaverted vision, or having traced 



90 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

the condition to its cause. An incidental and 
superficial treatment of the matter is the most 
that the majority of us attempt. It is "human 
nature," we say. And there is a good deal to 
justify this very common and very inconclusive 
observation on the case. That men rob one an- 
other on the fields of fun seems to be but a part 
of the whole story of " man's inhumanity to man." 

There is a familiar story of one who afterward 
became famous that when as a child he walked 
forth in his first pair of trousers, his pocket was 
full of new pennies which fond relatives had 
given him. Meeting on the street an older lad 
who was sporting with a new whistle, the little 
fellow coveted the whistle so ardently that he 
pulled out all his pennies, and offered them forth- 
with in exchange. The older boy promptly ac- 
cepted the offer, and the small boy walked off 
with his prize, only to discover a little later that 
he had paid its price several times over. In his 
case there was this much of compensation : he was 
able in later years to philosophize upon the inci- 
dent for the benefit of men who in much more 
serious ways were inclined to " pay too dear for 
their whistles." 

In this instance the older boy did what most 
boys and most men are quite too willing to do ; 
that is, he took advantage of the ignorance and 
inexperience of his fellow. This is what men are 
doing every day in business, in spite of all our 



THE EXPLOITATION OF FUN 91 

moralizing about the advantages of honesty as the 
best policy, and a good deal of plain preaching 
about the "false balance" as still "an abomina- 
tion to the Lord." 

The pity is that a great many of us who think 
ourselves observant, and who unquestionably are 
humane and moral in our intentions, do not see 
that there is anything more than this to the prob- 
lem of exploitation to-day. We are wholly satis- 
fied with the appeal to individual piety, or at the 
most with a corrective course of purely individual 
discipline. That men wrong each other, both in 
the selling of goods and in the catering to the 
appetite for pleasure, is a fact which we of course 
note, for it is a fact which all of us are bound to 
see. But we blame the wrong either upon the 
individual cupidity of the man who does the in- 
jury, or upon the individual false judgment of the 
one to whom the injury is done. What we do 
not see is this : — ^that, in making the world over 
into one neighborhood, in these last one hundred 
years especially, we have created conditions of 
temptation and of exploitation of one another, 
both with respect to business and with respect to 
pleasure, which call for a new understanding, and 
for measures of mutual consideration and protec- 
tion large enough to meet our enlarged hazards 
and needs. 

Take the manufacture and sale of lager beer as 
a specific instance. A prominent magazine writer, 



92 LAUGHTER AND LIFE 

in a recent issue of one of the best known Amer 
ican magazines, goes into a detailed study of this 
comparatively modern drink. Its discovery and 
first manufacture were hardly more than a house- 
hold incident. Of recent years lager beer has 
been " capitalized " to such an extent that the mat- 
ter of securing returns upon the stock of the " beer 
barons," — a very appropriate term, by the way, — 
is now practically impossible except as beer is arti- 
ficially manipulated in price and the consumption 
of the adulterated article is artificially stimulated. 

The twin evils which in our time have greatly 
multiplied the natural and ineradicable mischiev- 
ousness of the liquor traffic are, admittedly, the 
adulteration of the liquors themselves, and the 
" treating " habit. Both of these are inevitable con- 
sequents of the over-capitalization of the business. 
The article must continually be made cheaper, 
and the demand for it must be unnaturally 
advanced, in order to keep pace with the call for 
returns upon larger and larger proportions of 
" watered " stock. The " beer barons " can retain 
their baronies only as they make the retailers more 
and more their " retainers " and servitors, and as 
they are allowed by the public to use all manner 
of devices in cheapening the quality of their 
product and pushing the use of it by mischievous 
stimulation of the most dangerous and destructive 
sort. 

But lest we lay the blame too exclusively upon 



THE EXPLOITATION OF FUN 93 

the liquor traiRc, let us inquire whether this 
reasoning and practice have any relation to other 
kinds of business, and in particular to the business 
of supplying the people with recreation, amuse- 
ment, and fun. It will be found that very much 
the same situation has developed here, and that 
Christian men are unwillingly, if not unwittingly, 
involved in it. 

Here is a man, — a Christian man, — who is man- 
ager of a great street railway. He is always in 
his place at church on Sunday, and is the capable 
teacher of a large Bible class in the Sunday-school. 
He is conservative as to his theology, simple and 
sincerely devout as to his personal life, and a man 
of careful, exemplary habits, not only on Sunday 
but on every day of the week. Yet his railway 
offers every sort of sensational inducement to get 
the Sunday crowds for Sunday baseball, Sunday 
theaters, Sunday picnics, and Sunday sports of a 
still more questionable kind. The man himself 
takes no direct part in this advertising except to 
see that it is thoroughly and systematically done. 
Were he to refuse this much of participation, 
profits would fall off, and his official head would 
speedily follow. The efficiency of his railroad 
management depends in a degree upon his catering 
to a purely commercial estimate of productive fun. 
The stockholders and trustees are interested in the 
amusements of the hundreds of thousands to whom 
they minister on Sunday, chiefly as they can 



94 LAUGHTER AND LIFE 

make money out of that ministry of so-called rec- 
reation and delight. Doubtless they would prefer 
to have it real recreation and pure delight, and 
some of them may be far-sighted enough to see 
that, even from the standpoint of lasting profits, a 
people who have been well served in their amuse- 
ments are a better asset than a people who have 
been plundered and betrayed. But commonly 
there is no such far-sighted reckoning. It is a 
matter of getting immediate returns in the most 
liberal measure. The present cash value of fun is 
the first consideration. And to this end the worst 
kind of merrymaking may be the most productive 
fun. 

The fact is, the railway is under the same sort 
of economic pressure as the saloon, and the result 
is very much the same. There is, on the one 
hand, a constant tendency toward a cheapening 
of the service either at the expense of the product 
or of the producer, and there is, on the other hand, 
a like inevitable tendency toward an over-stimula- 
tion of trade at the cost oftentimes of public health 
and public morals. Our concern here with both 
of these instances is that in the first place they 
are directly and very influentially involved in the 
pleasure problem of our time, and, in the second 
place, they illustrate, in a way not to be mis- 
understood by any one who is willing to under- 
stand, the most serious aspect of the social side of 
amusements to-day. 



THE EXPLOITATION OF FUN 95 

There will be some who will fall back instantly 
upon the old Scripture, " The love of money is the 
root of all evil," or, more exactly and not quite so 
inclusively, " a root of all kinds of evil." But quote 
the text either way and you are still far from having 
analyzed the peculiar situation of our time. 

No one can prove for a moment that the love 
of money is naturally any stronger to-day than it 
has been ever since man came to know its use and 
power. To maintain this, is tacitly to admit the 
failure of two thousand years of Christian teach- 
ing and example. But there is no denying the 
fact that the opportunities for money-making are 
vastly greater in our own age, and throughout 
Christendom especially, than they have ever before 
been in the history of the world. Why " through- 
out Christendom especially " ? Is not this the 
explanation ? — that the quickening of man's fac- 
ulties, which has come through Christianity, has 
also inevitably quickened his temptations ? Chris- 
tianity has stimulated men to a commercial 
development that puts Christian principle to a 
severer strain. And if, on the point of money 
greed, the so-called Christian world sometimes 
appears to compare ill with the ancient pagan 
world or the world of heathenism to-day, those 
who make the comparison too often fail to take 
into account the fact that it is within the bounds 
of Christendom that the prizes of the profit-seekers 
have grown to such enormous proportions within 



96 LAUGHTER AND LIFE 

the period of something like the last one hundred 
years. 

Nor is the love of pleasure stronger to-day than 
it was of old. The opportunities for the pleasure- 
seeker, however, are vastly increased, and the op- 
portunity, especially of the man who seeks to 
make money out of the pleasure-seeking of others, 
is immeasurably greater than it has ever been. 
Christendom again is the field of a more varied 
and attractive amusement life than was ever 
dreamed of by the ancient world. And every 
department of that life is capitalized for every 
cent of dividend that it will carry. And at every 
point where pleasure touches on profit-making, the 
tendency is to cheapen the quality of the pleasure 
supplied, and to stimulate by the most dubious 
and dangerous devices an excited and abnormal 
demand for it. 

There are those, both Christian and non-Chris- 
tian, who will object to the suggestion that Chris- 
tianity is in any way responsible for what they 
regard as a purely economic situation. The inven- 
tion of the high-power machinery of our age, and 
the development of commercial conveniences and 
commercial concentration, together with the op- 
portunity which democracy has given for the 
keener competition of a multitude whose abilities 
have hitherto been suppressed, seem to such rea- 
soners a sufiicient explanation of the transforma- 
tion of the modern world which we have seen ; 



THE EXPLOITATION OF FUN 97 

or, if any further items are needed to complete 
the count, they are to be found in the field of 
economics alone. It is not fair to consider religion 
responsible for what seems to them such an irrelig- 
ious, or at least such an wwreligious, effect. 

Whatever the explanation, the fact is plain, 
and the fact itself is of chief importance here. 
Christendom to-day offers greater inducement to 
money-making than the paganism of yesterday 
offered, or the heathenism of to-day can offer. 
Likewise Christendom laughs more abundantly, 
and offers a far more abundant financial reward 
to those who promote laughter, than the world 
outside of Christendom of either the present or 
the past. 1^0 religion preaches more powerfully 
against the love of money than does Christianity ; 
none makes so much of self-sacrifice for the sake 
of others as against a selfish seeking of one's own 
pleasure. Yet nowhere is money-making so at- 
tractive as within the Christian world, and no- 
where is pleasure so systematically exploited in 
the interest of gain. 

Why should we be either surprised or disturbed 
that this is so ? Or why should we try to explain 
the facts in the case, — when we do not wilfully or 
carelessly ignore them, — by rushing to the pes- 
simistic conclusion that, in spite of the goodness 
and the larger revelations of God, man persistently 
and without cause waxes worse and worse ? 

No man is surprised or discomfited to discover 



98 LAtTGHTEE AND LIFE 

that, as he climbs a mountain, the atmosphere 
becomes more rare and breathing gets somewhat 
more difficult the higher he goes. No workman 
complains because he has to be more careful and 
painstaking as he passes from the rough labor 
with which he began to the detail of the precise 
finishing processes. No intelligent father and 
mother will deny that, great as are the problems 
of dealing with the infant child, there is need of 
greater acumen to deal with the more subtle 
problems of youth. On every hand the price of 
achievement is that the good we do calls con- 
tinually for a more exacting and difficult good. 
Progress, in every school, creates problems vastly 
more intricate and formidable than those which 
we have left behind. "We get our victories only 
that we may fight more arduous and more energiz- 
ing combats. 

Be this as it may, and whatever we conclude 
concerning the relation of our religious training 
and tradition to the marvelous world-transforma- 
tion which recent decades have seen, there is no 
room to doubt, much less to deny, the weighty 
bearing of the economic factor throughout the 
realms both of business and of fun. Ours is a 
money-making age, and all our preaching against 
the love of money is largely effort thrown away, 
if we do not face the facts and try to adjust our 
economics in the interest of Christian motives and 
ideals. Ours is also a pleasure-seeking age, both 



THE EXPLOITATION OF FUN 99 

because the opportunities for getting pleasure are 
vastly more extensive and attractive, and because 
the rewards for supplying pleasure are more gain- 
ful, than ever in the past. And the last fact is 
perhaps the largest fact that we have to face as 
regards the whole amusement problem of our day. 

The trail of the money-maker lies everywhere 
across the paths of pleasure. Here also, as in the 
world of manufacture and barter of goods, inven- 
tion has been busy, and the concentration of 
capital has steadily and most seriously increased. 
The popular sports, under our present economic 
order, are capitalized and monopolized quite as 
naturally and inevitably as are the best known 
brands of machinery, or wearing apparel and 
food. The brothels and the saloons, which cater 
to the baser appetites of men, are found to be 
systematized by a powerful few, who use them to 
the limit of their ingenuity and financial ability 
to exploit their victims. Adulteration and excita- 
tion go hand in hand. 

It is not less so within the limits of opportunity 
with regard to the simpler, finer, and more legiti- 
mate pleasures. These also are capitalized so as 
to carry as much as they can be made to carry 
of watered stock. They are mischievously manip- 
ulated both as to quality and quantity, that they 
may be made profitable, not naturally and health- 
fully for those who use them, but artificially and 
exorbitantly, to fatten fortunes which in many 



100 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

instances are already unhealthfully large, or to 
gratify the unscrupulous greed of those who covet 
such fortunes. The debasement of fun is easy 
enough and serious enough when there is no 
organized effort to debase it on the part of men 
who can see huge profits in exploiting the pleas- 
ures of their neighbors. Laughter lends itself 
readily to thoughtlessness and excess. How much 
greater, then, is the menace of amusements delib- 
erately debased with all the ingenuity that 
modern business enterprise can command ! And 
how will it fare with our individual ideals of 
purity and of purpose in play, if w^e do not meet 
the organized and subsidized exploitation of fun 
with clear vision as to how much more than a 
personal issue the question of our merrymaking 
has become, and with some effective concert of 
action along social lines ? 



CHAPTER YIII 
LEGISLATION AND LAUGHTEE 

Theee is no adage of our time which is more 
overworked by the moral obstructionists and social 
reactionaries than the saying that you cannot make 
a man good by act of legislature. The saying has 
not even the authority of a great name behind it, 
yet it is as much in vogue in certain circles as if it 
had been of the very substance of literature since 
Shakespere shaped his dramas, or Chaucer gave us 
his Canterbury Tales. 

The saying, as used by those who are impatient 
at the interference of law with the profits which 
they are making at the expense of society, is very 
seldom sincere. It partakes of the character of 
many an ancient protest which the Scriptures re- 
cite. It is the cry of the unclean spirits again, 
" What have we to do with thee, Jesus, thou Naz- 
arene? Art thou come to destroy us ? " Or it is 
the angry clamor of very human spirits whose 
idols are about to be overthrown, led by some 
Demetrius who is very much aware of the fact 
" that by this business we have our wealth." It is 
the man who, under cover of law, is debauching 
his fellows for gain, that is generally at the front 
when it is proposed to remove from him the pro- 
101 



102 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

tection of the law and give that protection to his 
victims. 

]^owhere is this very dubious protest more in 
evidence than it is at the point of the pleasure life 
of our day. The liquor men again are first and 
foremost here. There is much deprecation of 
" sumptuary laws " as ineffective, and contrary to 
the interests of character by those who have very 
little character of their own and are entirely will- 
ing to ruin the character of others for a reward. 
Much is made of " temperance " as against pro- 
hibition, on the ground that what men and women 
need is not to be exempt from temptation but to 
develop the strength to overcome temptation. At 
this point there are some who are not directly in- 
terested on the side of the exploitation of pleasure 
who are in danger of being deceived. 

The fallacy of this whole philosophy of disin- 
genuous desire for a larger freedom for men is 
easily proved when the natural bearings of the 
argument are taken into account. This much- 
talked-of " liberty " may mean the opportunity of 
men to dope and drug their fellows with drink or 
other man-destroying poisons. Or it may be the 
defense of an unnecessary and soul-stultifying 
poverty. Or, as is often the case, it may be the 
plea of the pleasure-makers who are unmaking 
their fellows for the sake of getting quick divi- 
dends on over-capitalized fun. In any case the 
objection to protective legislation as tending to 



LEGISLATION AND LAUGHTER 103 

weaken character is utterly disproved by all the 
analogies of the natural world when fairly inter- 
preted, and much more by a right understanding 
of the genesis and genius of our civilization. 

We do not build fences around trees in public 
places to make them grow, and no one imagines 
for a minute that such is the object for which they 
are there. But, because the place is public, and 
because of unusual conditions of exposure, the pro- 
tecting fence is found effective in our parks and on 
our streets. The trees grow all the better if horses 
are prevented from gnawing away the bark, and 
small boys from breaking down the branches. 

The owner of a large mountain ranch in Cali- 
fornia, which was generally given over to natural 
vegetation, desired to raise some garden stuff near 
the house. The mountain quail were so abundant 
and so destructive that he was compelled to cover 
the growing lettuce and like produce of his garden 
with wire netting. Many a man passed by and 
noted the wire screen, and at once understood its 
purpose. There were " wets " as well as " drys " 
among his friends, but none of them ventured to 
suggest to him that he could not make lettuce 
grow by wiring it in. Yet, at the same time, they 
were using a similar argument against proposals 
to protect the growing youth of the community 
from something a thousandfold more mischievous 
than quail. 

It is sometimes assumed by the exponents of 



104 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

evolution that the law of life, where man does not 
change it, is " the survival of the fittest." By this 
is generally meant the strong. " Nature, red in 
tooth and claw," lets men struggle for existence, 
and thereby only the hardy and the worthy sur- 
vive. Some would have it that, with respect to 
social conditions, whether they concern work or 
play, the same rule ought to prevail, and that life 
would be the better for having to prove itself out 
in this way. 

But this is a very one-sided and quite obsolete 
interpretation of "natural selection." Granted 
that the method of creation is by development 
from the lower to the higher, and that weakness 
and unworthiness tend, in the actual contest of life, 
to eliminate themselves, it is still true that the 
protective ministry of love has had its part in the 
upward course of things. It is a mistake to speak 
as if the unsocial qualities have been the most pro- 
ductive of progress. Quite the contrary is the 
truth. The longer infancy of man, with the con- 
sequent need of greater protection for the human 
child than is accorded the lower animals, is now 
recognized as one of the chief factors, on the 
physical side, of man's superiority over the crea- 
tures of the wild. And even among the lower 
animals, those which have most availed themselves 
of the protective arm of man are precisely those 
which have survived as against the wilder and 
fiercer forms of life. 



LEGISLATION AND LATJGHTEE 105 

Law is indeed unavailing to develop character 
if a man resists it ; — as unavailing as are the bars 
which shut the tiger in but leave his native 
fierceness untamed. However, it is those crea- 
tures which have submitted to prohibitions, not 
those which have raged and chafed against them, 
that have remained and improved, while the 
more " independent " sort have perished, or exist 
only as solitary specimens in an unhappy captivity. 

'Now herein is the very heart of civilization. 
Since man became man he has made progress 
only as he has submitted to the limitation of his 
individual whim and caprice for the sake of the 
social good. All growth in government means 
the prevalence of the common welfare over the 
mere impulses of the individual and the mob. 
Those societies which have submitted most intelli- 
gently to the guiding hand of law, have far out- 
stripped the savage races which still maintain 
their original independence of restraint. When 
Rudyard Kipling says, 

" The 'eathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone, 
'E don't obey no orders except they is his own," 

he is marking, consciously or unconsciously, the 
dividing-line between the man who is civilized 
and the man who is not. The civilized man 
knows how to make and accept prohibitions. The 
uncivilized man is against any interference with 
his immediate desires. 



106 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

There went the round of the newspapers a 
while ago a humorous story which emphasized in 
a popular way the same fundamental fact :— that 
progress proceeds from the law of social consider- 
ation and not from a license to do as you please. 

It was the Fourth of July. A drunken man 
staggered out of a saloon and began hailing 
everybody in sight in a very noisy way. He was 
apparently very much impressed in his own mind 
with the fact that it was Independence Day, but 
he had a very common misunderstanding of what 
independence means. 

"Ah, there," he said to an Irishman against 
whom he jostled, " I want you to understand that 
this is a free country, and that I am a free man. 
Yes, sir, this is a free country, and it's liberty that 
every man has here. Liberty ! liberty ! Do you 
hear ? " 

He swung his fists around recklessly as he 
spoke, and unfortunately hit the Irishman on the 
nose. The Irishman at once knocked the man 
down, and began to pummel him vigorously. At 
length when he had cried, " Enough," the Irish- 
man let him up slowly, with this sage advice : 

" This is a frhee counthry all right, me friend, 
and it's lots of liberty folks do be havin' here. 
But I wants ye to understand that your liberty 
inds where me nose begins ! " 

It is exactly this lesson which a multitude of 
people need to learn ; — that the liberty of one 



LEGISLATION AND LAUGHTEE 107 

man ends where the rights of another man begin. 
And the purpose of the law is to teach men this 
lesson, by word of legislation if possible, and by 
force if need be. 

It would be just as sensible to say that one can- 
not make people well by law as it is to say that 
one cannot make men good by law. The fact is, 
that we are making men well by law, or at least 
we are preventing other people from making them 
sick, and in many instances preventing people 
from destroying themselves. Havana was made 
sanitary by law, with the consequence that hun- 
dreds of lives were saved, and the world was 
given an illustration of the importance of wise 
legislation in relation to health. The Panama 
Canal Zone was as notable a triumph of the en- 
forcement of prohibition as it was a mighty en- 
gineering achievement which would have failed of 
accomplishment if there had not been some effec- 
tive regulation beforehand. A single American 
city is said to have reduced the infant mortality 
rate by more than fifty per cent, through the 
prohibition of an unhealthful milk supply, and 
the legal regulation of the business of those who 
sold that very important article of food. 

The fear of those who make this argument, — 
that morality is not to be had by act of legisla- 
ture, — is not that preventive legislation will fail 
to accomplish the impi'ovement of society, but 
that it will succeed. They may argue, as do cer- 



108 LAUGHTER AND LIFE 

tain types of newspapers which cater to the love 
of sensation and to the appeal of the spectacular, 
— both fundamental factors in the amusement 
problem, — that they are only giving the people 
what they want, but they know well enough that 
the feeding of a bad appetite is a most effective 
way of promoting its growth. On the other 
hand, the removal of incitement often means the 
speedy elimination of the thing itself. There is a 
profound wisdom in those phrases of the Lord's 
Prayer which deal with moral deliverance, much 
as they have puzzled certain commentators. 
" And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us 
from evil," or " from the evil one." No part of 
this great prayer is more emphatically social than 
are these words. It is the business of society to 
remove temptations from the way of the weak, 
the uninstructed, and the overburdened, and to 
see to it that every " evil one " who seeks to trap 
men to their destruction is made ineffective for 
mischief and is speedily put out of the way. 

That we are recognizing this obligation more 
and more is evident on every hand, in spite of all 
the fallacious objections which are made. The 
saying of the great English statesman, "William 
Ewart Gladstone, that government ought to make 
it " as easy as possible to do right, and as hard as 
possible to do wrong," while very far from having 
the practical acceptance which it ought to have, 
is nevertheless a sentiment that is increasingly 



LEGISLATION AND LAUGHTEE 109 

influential in public address and in the shaping 
of the modern state. 

Two men were passing along the street not very 
far from a public school in one of our western 
cities. They were practically strangers to each 
other, and it is doubtful whether either knew the 
other's name. In a vacant lot on the right, which 
was evidently private property, there was an open 
ditch, probably five feet deep and about four feet 
across. Both of them commented instantly on 
the dangerous character of the excavation, and 
one of them recited two or three instances of 
recent occurrence which emphasized this danger. 
The other man expressed the opinion that such an 
open menace to the children of the neighboring 
school was contrary to the law. To this the first 
speaker objected, on the ground that it was " pri- 
vate property," as though that point precluded 
all interference. Private property apparently 
loomed very large in his thought. 

But the principle may be held to be now fairly 
established, that no property is private when it is 
held against the public good. The right of " emi- 
nent domain," by which governments, either local 
or general, may take possession of private holdings 
for public service, has long been recognized. The 
extent of the social sovei-eignty is being enlarged 
every day. Even the sign-board man is slowly 
yielding to the very intangible, but none the less 
very important, property-holding of the public in 



110 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

scenic beauty, and the day is not far distant when 
no man will be allowed to annoy the eyes of the 
public with advertising devices on house or barn 
or field, — however much he may hold legal title 
in these material things, — to the detriment of the 
intellectual and esthetic enjoyments of his fellows. 

With respect to public safety, the limitation of 
private liberty grows more marked every year. 
" Safety first " is a slogan which has to do with 
much more than the intrusion of pedestrians upon 
railway tracks, or with public carelessness in the 
use of this or that kind of corporation service. 
The corporations have beyond question a right to 
emphasize the safeguarding of the public against 
the public's own negligence. But if individuals 
are to consider safety first as against their reckless 
haste and their diverting interests, the law is 
bound to insist that the corporations themselves 
shall emphasize a safe and comfortable and wholly 
efficient service, rather than seek swollen divi- 
dends on watered stock upon which future genera- 
tions are expected to pay increasing returns. In 
the realm of railway service and other corporate 
business enterprise, we have come to see very 
clearly of late that the individual approach to 
the problem is not enough ; that society is bound 
to protect the individual against the man, or group 
of men, who, to make profits increase, would sac- 
rifice him in life and limb. 

In very moderate measure we have recognized 



LEGISLATION AND LAUGHTEE 111 

tlie same right and obligation to safeguard by law 
those who are endangered in the field of fun. To 
a mischievous extent, the business of amusing the 
people has been and is yet carried on with alto- 
gether too much freedom from sound social re- 
straint. We have ignored in great degree the tre- 
mendous growth of capitalization with respect to 
the people's pleasures, and have trusted too ex- 
clusively to individual moral exhortation or the 
slow development of a modifying public sentiment. 
We have preached to young people against the 
dance, the theater, and the card party, while we 
have allowed to go practically unrebuked the men 
and women who have organized to make all ques- 
tionable amusements more profitable to themselves 
by making them more seductively irresistible to 
the young. In other words, we have been meet- 
ing the most highly organized and the most ef- 
ficiently directed armies of vice the world has ever 
seen, equipped with the most costly and destructive 
artillery which modern capital can secure, with the 
individual flint-lock and short sword of our ances- 
tors. The present European war has shown that 
even the tactics of a Napoleon are out of date 
since the single battle front of Austerlitz and 
Jena ; while Waterloo has been superseded by the 
well-nigh inconceivable reach of a modern bat- 
tle-line along hundreds of miles of contending 
armies. 
So also has the battle-front of the world of 



112 LAUGHTER AND LIFE 

amusement changed. It is no longer a question 
only of the individual " woman that was a sinner," 
standing with downcast eyes before the Master 
and exhorted by him to "go and sin no more." 
The same compassion, indeed, is at the heart of all 
uplift work to-day, and the rebuke of Jesus to the 
Pharisees who brought such a woman to him, " He 
that is without sin among you, let him first cast a 
stone," is as piercingly pertinent as it was of old. 
But the profits of the traffic have grown, and the 
woman to-day is the victim of an organized on- 
slaught, to overthrow which will require the full 
strength of the law-making forces of society. "We 
have not ceased preaching to the woman, and we 
have greater need to exhibit the spirit of Jesus 
toward her than our respectable timidity likes to 
admit. But we are awaking to the fact that there 
is a place for law as well as for love in this pro- 
gram. Through whatever private property this 
ditch of iniquity may run, we are bound to see 
that it is closed. We may not longer be content 
with chiding those who stumble into it for their 
costly carelessness, nor even with the more pity- 
ing mood of drawing them out of the ditch and 
wiping the filth away with loving hands. It is 
our business to act together to the end that, so 
far as possible, this temptation may be removed 
from the pathway of all our kind. 

It is just as much our business to have regard to 
the legal overthrow of every form of pleasure life 



LEGISLATION AND LAUGHTEE 113 

which makes for the undoing of our fellows. The 
injunction to " look not on the wine when it is red " 
gains greater force if society refuses to look upon 
the making and the selling of that which, at the 
last, both socially and individually, " biteth like a 
serpent and stingeth like an adder." We ought 
not to allow any man to profit himself by working 
unprofitableness to his neighbor. And if it is 
peculiarly the business of society to see to it that 
the physical menace is removed from the neigh- 
borhood of the public school, and that the high- 
ways which are frequented by the children are 
doubly secure against dangerous devices, it is even 
more incumbent upon the community to see to it 
that pitfalls, more enticing to the young, and more 
ruinous by far to those who fall into them, are 
not kept open and made deliberately attractive to 
unwary feet. 

There were in the days of our fathers men who 
made a business of shipwrecking, putting forth false 
lights to draw men to disaster and death. The 
richer the traffic, the greater was the incentive to 
this nefarious trade. Sailors were warned against 
these wreckers, and there is no doubt that many 
were saved in this way. Others there were, 
doubtless, who might have been saved if they 
had been more heedful of these warnings, or less 
recklessly bent upon following their own way. 
But relief came when the public mood awakened 
to the need of drastic legislation against these 



114 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

pirates along English and other European coasts, 
and the wreckers were summarily suppressed. 
Likewise our American fathers dealt with the 
pirates of Tripoli, whom the European nations 
had allowed to go practically unchecked. It is 
no longer left to the individual ship or to the in- 
dividual sailor to guard against those who would 
destroy them for gain, but all nations are banded 
together to keep piracy from all the seas. 

The pirates, however, who, in our great cities, 
go out in search of the pleasure craft of our 
youth, and who organize to make their expedi- 
tions more powerful and their devices more 
successfully destructive, are as yet but slightly 
limited in their evil work. "We are still so much 
under the influence of the " laissezfaire " doctrine 
in business, which is merely modern French for 
the ancient diabolism, "Let us alone," that we 
are more careful of the rights of the destroyers 
than we are of the rights of the destroyed. 

There is a story of a young woman whose 
father was protesting with her against what he 
deemed a dangerous course. " I have had experi- 
ence, daughter," he said seriously, to which the 
girl flippantly and ignorantly replied, " But, papa, 
I want to have experience, too." It is the claim 
of some that experience is the best guide, and 
that only so do people really learn anything. 
These profess to believe that evil will correct 
itself, if given freedom to work itself out, and 



LEGISLATION AND LAUGHTEE 115 

therefore they would have recourse to law only 
as a last resort. 

But experience is social as well as individual. 
It ought not to be necessary for the race to repeat 
an experience in every individual, any more than 
for the individual to fall into the same ditch to- 
day out of which he was plucked in unhappy con- 
dition yesterday. And as to the contention that 
evil needs only to be let alone in order to correct 
itself, this teaching is a dangerous exaggeration 
and perversion of the great truth that sin bears 
in itself the root of its own ruin. The ancient 
oracle recognized the inherent weakness of wick- 
edness in the familiar saying, " The wicked flee 
when no man pursueth." But there is wisdom as 
well as wit back of the clever comment of the 
evangelist, Sam Jones, on the above text, "I 
notice that they make a whole lot better time 
when the righteous are after them." 

In spite of this " let alone " doctrine, it is a 
long time since men have had a free hand in 
counterfeiting or otherwise corrupting the mone- 
tary standard. We do not throw upon, the indi- 
vidual the risk of detecting, or failing to detect, 
whether the money which he handles is good or 
bad. If we did, we might all be more expert in 
handling currency, but our knowledge would be 
bought at too heavy a cost. It is a significant 
fact that the government is very much concerned 
with the protection of money. It is far easier 



116 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

to run down and convict tlie counterfeiter than 
many another evil-doer whose more serious of- 
fense against man is apparently of lighter con- 
cern to the powers that be than is a direct offense 
against Mammon. 

Of late years, however, we have done some- 
thing to protect the individual not only against 
those who would depreciate and adulterate his 
coin, but against those other counterfeiters and 
adulterators who have been singularly and shame- 
fully immune, — the traffickers in impure food. 
Not yet have we given this offense the vigorous 
legal treatment which has made the debasing of 
the coinage so unprofitable. It is still safer by 
far to poison babies than it is to " sweat " money. 
But we have made some progress, and it is no 
longer incumbent on the untrained housewife to 
do all that is to be done toward the protection of 
the family meal. Some day, when we think of 
all our " breaking of bread "as an expression of 
our fellowship with the Master, we shall have a 
" pure food law " that will make the poisoning of 
food as abhorrent, even in the midst of our in- 
dustrial warfare, as is the old-fashioned device of 
poisoning wells in the international warfare of to- 
day. 

Yet we have no greater need of effective legis- 
lation on behalf of pure food than we have of 
well-thought-out and well-enforced laws on behalf 
of pure fun. Corrupt fun is more seriously de- 



LEGISLATIOlSr AND LAUGHTEE 117 

moralizing than corrupt food. " That which goes 
into the mouth " can destroy only the body. But 
there is a vast amount of laughter which comes 
out of the mouth that is destructive of all that is 
worth while in man and in society. 

It is not enough that we eliminate the grosser 
forms of sensuous pleasure. It is not enough that 
we prohibit the sale of such drugs and drinks as 
are most obviously demoralizing. The appetite 
for pleasure is as natural as the appetite for 
food. Put bad food within reach of the people 
under conditions which make it immediately 
cheap to the consumer, and at the same time 
extraordinarily profitable to the purveyor, and 
bad food will be bought and sold in large quanti- 
ties. More effective measures of a more affirma- 
tive character must be taken. We must make 
good food abundant, and must put it within the 
means of all. 

And this we must do with our amusements. 
Men and women will have them, tainted or not, 
and they will have them of a corrupt kind, if such 
can be had cheaper than the better quality of fun 
and frolic, and if there are big returns to the few 
in serving to the many these poisoned pleasures. 
The wrong kind of recreation must be made un- 
profitable, obviously and very seriously unprofit- 
able, to those who purvey it, as well as to those 
who purchase it, and the right kind of recreation 
must be made accessible and attractive, and made 



118 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

indeed the only kind that is legally available, if 
we are to teach our cities and nations, as well as 
individuals, to laugh unto God. 

It was said of Mrs. Catherine Booth, one of the 
most remarkable mothers that ever lived, that she 
gave all her children to understand while yet very 
young that she would not tolerate a bad child. 
She made good attractive, but she outlawed in- 
iquity in a very positive way. 

"Mother," said little Mary, "I don't like the 
way Willie sets traps for the birds, and I prayed 
God he wouldn't let him catch any." " That's 
right, Mary," replied the mother, who had not 
much control over Willie. "But that isn't all, 
mother," went on the little girl, who had already 
shown a good deal of positive character. "I 
kicked his nasty old traps all to pieces." 

Perhaps the little girl's spirit left something to 
be desired, but there is vast need of more of her 
affirmative mood in dealing with the traps which 
beset the pleasure fields of modern life. It is the 
business of good people to be aggressively, mili- 
tantly good. It is for them even now to rule the 
earth, if they will but enter into the power of 
Jesus. Much of his cross and his suffering they 
must know first ; — the mood of an infinite and in- 
exhaustible compassion must be theirs. But there 
must also be the mood of the throne and the 
crown, the mood of a royal and irresistible au- 
thority. And, even as we repeat, in our sufferings 



LEGISLATION AND LAUGHTER 119 

with and for the guilty, the death of his cross, so 
may we anticipate, in our sense of power and our 
assertion of dominion, the glory of that day when 
" the kingdom of the world is become the king- 
dom of our Lord, and of his Christ." 



CHAPTER IX 
SPOET AND EVANGELISM 

Law, to be effective, must be the expression 
of public sentiment. Public sentiment is itself a 
growth, and depends for its value upon long and 
painstaking and intelligent cultivation. It is no 
more an accident, or a beneficence thrust upon us, 
than is the Burbank potato, the navel orange, or 
the first-prize chrysanthemum at the floral show. 
All that makes public sentiment to-day better than 
in the days when the favorite pastimes of the 
Romans were duels between gladiators and the 
tormenting of Christians in the arena, has been 
won, from age to age, at the cost of innumerable 
unrecorded martyrdoms. A well-developed and 
morally fruitful public sentiment has always to 
be watered liberally with the blood of persecuted 
moral pioneers. 

The martyrs are the first evangelists of all prog- 
ress. They do not get the crowd, but, to use a 
popular expression, the crowd "gets them." After 
them come in time the evangelists of the multi- 
tude, who are often "preferred before them." 
Public sentiment of to-day owes to these earlier 
voices what the farmer owes to the investigator 
120 



SPOET AND EVANGELISM 121 

at the experiment station, what the manufacturer 
and the salesman owe to the inventor, what the 
western city owes to the emigrant train. 

It is an interesting fact that certain of those 
who are most prominent to-day in the domain of 
religious evangelism have come from the field 
of professional sport. There are others besides 
the Kev. William A. Sunday to whom this remark 
applies, though he is probably the most conspicu- 
ous of his class. That he is even yet everywhere 
commonly known as "Billy" Sunday is signifi- 
cant of the fact that he still carries the cognomen 
of the sporting world, while his methods of preach- 
ing are likewise more athletic and " sporty " than 
they are formally intellectual or conventionally 
devout. 

This is not said by way of criticism, since we 
are not concerned here with either criticism or 
commendation. It is said to emphasize the fact 
that the field of sport has already invaded the 
field of evangelism, and that it is quite time that 
evangelism took more heed of the province of 
sport. It is time that the principles which have 
cost the pioneers so much to establish in the 
domain of religion, and in the affairs of state, 
should be applied vigorously, and, so far as pos- 
sible, popularly, to the province of play. We 
need an active propaganda of the naturalness, 
wholesomeness, and seriousness of the mirth-loving 
mood. We need to preach as part of our evangel- 



122 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

ism the Christ of the playground. Especially do 
we need to emphasize the sovereignty of a uni- 
versal and uniform social law, as pertinent and im- 
placable with respect to the right use of laughter 
as with respect to the right use of liturgy, or lit- 
erature, or law. 

Evangelism has done something, probably too 
much, in the way of prohibition, though that has 
been confined to but a limited section of the area of 
recreation. The trinity of dubious amusements, — 
the card party, the theater, and the dance, — have 
been discussed by evangelists, and preachers of 
the evangelistic type, with an exclusiveness per- 
haps even more objectionable than the occasional 
coarseness of such discussion, or the more habitual 
indiscriminateness with which these particular 
play forms of the adolescent period and of adult 
life have been denounced. Other forms of amuse- 
ment of very questionable value have been left 
practically unconsidered, and, what is yet more 
serious, moods of fretfulness, melancholy, ill- 
temper, and morbid religiosity, vastly more mis- 
chievous than many a harshly censored merry- 
making of uninstructed young people, have been 
passed over in silence, or more or less implic- 
itly justified and promoted, by evangelists them- 
selves. 

Evangelism has made altogether too much, 
judged by the precept and practice of Jesus, of 
the appeal to fear, of a morbid emphasis upon 



SPOET AND EVANGELISM 123 

human mortality, and of the portrayal of disem- 
bodied delights. Its goodness has too often been 
of an ephemeral, sentimental sort which could 
be maintained in young people only by the con- 
tinual cultivation of unyouthf ul habits of thought, 
or of intellectual and spiritual attitudinizings 
which do not make for either mental or moral 
character. There is great need of the heartiness 
and unaffectedness of the playground in our pre- 
sentation of religion, especially in its presentation 
to the young. 

Improvement there is in a marked degree. 
Largely through the young people's societies of 
various names and kinds, there has come to pass a 
much more healthful type of religious appeal, 
which has, in a measure, banished the unreal ap- 
peal of other days. There is an interesting con- 
trast between the 'New England "pulpit saint" 
of a hundred years ago, the Eev. Edward Pay- 
son, D. D., and the still more widely known min- 
ister of another church in the same city, " Father 
Endeavor " Clark. The familiarity of the later 
title is no more in contrast with the formality of 
the earlier one than is the general appeal of their 
individuality and of the types of teaching which 
they represent. IS'otwithstanding that there was 
much of natural humor in Payson's make-up, 
ready mother-wit, facetious pleasantry, and a keen 
sense of the ridiculous, all these were covered up 
by the somber spiritual moods of the day. It is 



124 LAUGHTER AND LIFE 

evident to any candid reader of Payson's biog- 
raphy, however generous may be the reader's 
appreciation of the great moral and intellectual 
values of his ministry, that his religious experience 
lacked a normal and healthful human cheerful- 
ness. Without the slightest desire to depreciate 
the one man, or to embarrass the other with any- 
thing like personal adulation, it is pertinent to 
this discussion to point out that, in the contrast 
between Edward Payson and Francis E. Clark, 
there is something which is much more than per- 
sonal. It is rather a social token of the progress 
which we have made toward a truer view of the 
relation between sportiveness and spirituality. 
The more modern type of religion is suffused with 
a glow of healthfulness and good cheer which 
was conspicuously absent from the religion of a 
century ago. 

The same fact is emphasized in a different way 
by the evangelism of " Billy " Sunday, to which 
reference has already been made. No such evan- 
gelist would have been possible a hundred, or 
even fifty, years ago. This may be taken by 
some as a sign of decadence on our part, but one 
need not make himself sponsor for the methods 
of Mr. Sunday as a whole, and especially those 
phases of his evangelism which have given offense 
to the sense of reverence in some of us, to main- 
tain that such an evangelism, judged in a large 
way, is a part of the approach of religion to thQ 



SPOET AND EVAKGELISM 125 

naturalness and spontaneity of every-day life. It 
is, indeed, possible to think of it, with, all reason- 
able reservations allowed for, as a phase of our 
more vital and more universal interpretation of 
the central Christian doctrine, the doctrine of the 
incarnation of the divine in human form. " Get- 
ting next to men " is another way of " making 
the Word flesh," of putting the majesty and 
mystery of the divine into terms of the simplest 
and most ordinary experiences of the human. A 
Christ who makes no appeal to the ball-field lacks 
somewhat of being as human to-day as Jesus was 
at Nazareth and Galilee. 

The appeal can hardly work widely except as 
it works both ways. The pulpit cannot long ex- 
pect to attract the ball-field if the ball-field does 
not attract the pulpit. If we are to get evangel- 
ism oi!,t of the field of sport, we must get evan- 
gelism into the field of sport. By this is meant 
much more than the winning of personal recruits 
for the pulpit from among the professionals of 
track and field, and more than the gain of per- 
sonal converts for the churches from the same or 
allied sections of the social life. "With all its im- 
portance, this is almost incidental to the main 
thing, which is not securing preachers or converts 
from any one class, but rather the transfiguration 
of our whole presentation of the gospel into a 
closer and closer correspondence with all the as- 
pects of real living, thus penetrating those human 



126 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

pursuits which seem most secular with the very 
essence and vitality of religion. 

This is our task, and it is a tremendous task 
from whichever point it is viewed. To make re- 
ligion as natural and unaffected as a game of 
ball, or, for that matter, a game of " blindman's- 
buff," or any like sport, is no easier than it is to 
make a game of ball, or a merry-go-round as gen- 
uinely harmonious with our sense of a moral or- 
der, and with our faith in the dominance and 
permanence of the unseen, as we have been accus- 
tomed to think the song of praise or the voice of 
prayer. Yet both of these things we are bound 
to attempt and to achieve, if we are to carry out 
to the full the implicit program of Jesus. 

It is at this point that the large significance of 
the question of amusements comes into view. 
Amusements are seen to be no longer incidental 
to what one has finely designated " the Christian 
view of God and the world," but they are a most 
important medium of exchange by which com- 
merce is established and increased between life 
and faith. Get young people to see this and you 
have given them the most vital conception of life 
and of religion that you can give them. Their 
amusements are no longer an aside, a by-path into 
which they seek permission to go with something 
of the unconf essed feeling which led the little boy, 
about to depart for a two or three weeks' " good 
time," to say, with boyish frankness, " Good-bye, 



SPOET AND EVANGELISM 127 

God ; we're going on a vacation." Whether we 
admit it or not, that is the way many of us feel 
about our fun. Too few will venture to think of 
" religious exercises " as adding to the zest of even 
a church social. To propose them at an ordinary 
house-party in even a confessedly Christian home 
would produce something like consternation, 
although such consternation might be politely 
concealed. The " worldly " would regard such a 
proposal as an infringement on their fun, as tak- 
ing off it the keen edge of pleasure ; while the 
" religious " would be quite as likely to feel that 
the mixture of praying and playing was unfor- 
tunate and bordered upon irreverence. 

" Be good, and you'll be happy," we sometimes 
say with a certain lightness, in lieu of saying 
"good-bye." It is very much to be questioned 
whether many of us seriously believe that this is 
so. The modern humorist's version of the saying, 
" Be good, and you'll be lonesome," answers much 
more nearly to the average actual conviction as to 
the facts in the case. Commonly we think of 
downright goodness as a pretty serious business 
which has to be got through with in the best way 
we can ; but the connection between goodness 
and a good time for just common, normal men 
and women is not felt to be very close. And 
religion is thought of in some quarters as some- 
thing rather distinct from goodness, and of even 
a more serious cast. 



128 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

It is because there is, in the thought of most 
people, this contrast between praying and playing, 
that there needs to be more communion between 
them. Each of these exercises needs qualities 
which ordinarily belong to the other. Our pray- 
ing is very much in need of the simple sincerity 
and self-unconsciousness of play. Our playing 
needs more of the thoughtfulness and purity of 
purpose which belong to prayer. We have a 
right to be as natural when we pray as when we 
play. It is not impossible to keep " in tune with 
the Infinite " in the midst of laughter and frolic 
and song. It is neither irreverent nor irrelevant 
to quote in this connection the words commonly 
associated with the one experience which is most 
profoundly serious and most overliowingly joyous, 
" What God hath joined together, let not man put 
asunder." The fact that marriage can be most 
highly serious and joyous at one and the same 
time is a token of the ministry with which a liv- 
ing faith may serve the ends of a lively fun, and 
a well balanced and vigorously sincere fun may 
serve the ends of an uplifting, inspiring, and com- 
forting faith. Whenever they are well mated in 
one person, they make the most charming and 
convincing kind of Christian in the world. 

It is apart of the business of modern evangelism 
to produce such Christians. Until we do, the 
appeal of religion will fall short of conscious 
acceptance and clear-cut confession in a multitude 



SPOET AND EVANGELISM 129 

who belong of right to the Church of God. Until 
we do, the realms of amusement will be too much 
given over, as they are now, to those who make 
them mighty for evil, instead of being, as they 
should be, mighty for good. To treat the laughter 
side of life as a barely tolerated province, where 
the Christian may go under guard, as it were, is a 
mistake of no small consequence to both sides. It 
is akin to the mistake of those who would divorce 
strength and beauty, or nutriment and flavor. 
There is no good reason why the life that is good 
should not be made attractive as well. 

How is this evangelism to be achieved ? Cer- 
tainly not by despising the sense of reverence, on 
the one hand, by forcing the facetious into sacred 
places, nor by formalizing fun, on the other hand, 
by intruding the aspect of seriousness upon the 
resorts of amusement and mirth. This would be 
to make both unreal, and what is wanted is that 
the reality of each shall be made to strengthen 
and enlarge the reality of the other. To interrupt 
prayer with laughter, or laughter with prayer, is 
artificial and inapt. But to touch the spirit of 
prayer with the spirit of honest laughter, and to 
touch laughter with the fine inner quality of heart- 
felt prayer, is to perform an invaluable service to 
both. Above all, to claim all life as Christian in 
intention, and to make all life Christian in fact, is 
the very end for which all legitimate evangelism 
exists. 



130 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

But how to do it, — that is the question. How 
can we work to a common end through things 
which seem so inevitably diverse as sport and 
evangelism ? The answer is not so difficult as it 
seems, if we really believe what has already been 
said. If we want more of the tone-quality of 
every-day life in our religion, and more of the 
tone-quality of religion in our every-day life, we 
shall get this happy result as we get every other 
good thing, by talking about it and going after it. 
Kot by merely condemning some kinds of sport, 
nor by just caricaturing some kinds of religion, 
but by trying to see both sides of life from a com- 
mon view-point, and measuring all that we do 
with regard to one and the same great end of be- 
ing, — after this manner shall we find the unity 
and ministry which lie between them. 

To revert to the illustration of the marriage 
tie, because in this relationship seriousness and 
happiness are rightfully blended in the highest 
degree, it is possible to secure a kind of unity be- 
tween married people by subordinating the one 
to the other. The man may be dominant, in 
which case the masculine will rule in the home. 
Or the woman may be dominant, in which case 
the feminine will be first. But the truer unity 
lies in the recognition of both, in a fine balancing 
of masculine and feminine, so that the home gets 
the benefit of the equal ministry of each. This is 
the type of home that the world is seeking to-day. 



SPOET AND EVANGELISM 131 

And it is the type of religion that the world 
needs, and that the world more or less consciously 
wants. We do not want a worldly church, and 
we do not want a churchly world. We want the 
fulness of the human in both. We want an evan- 
gelism big enough to take in both, and to give 
both full play in the perfecting of life. 

The individual attitude toward individual ex- 
pressions both of the play life and of the prayer 
life will differ. Some of us are ritualists in re- 
ligion, and some of us are not. Some of us can- 
not abide an eifervescence of enthusiasm which 
overflows in undignified demonstrations in the 
house of God ; others of us are equally impatient 
of the dignity which runs to the repetition of set 
forms and the sounding of sonorous phrases. We 
are slowly learning a larger tolerance of the 
many methods by which men find God and ex- 
press their equally sincere allegiance to him. 

Why should we expect that we shall all agree 
as to the forms of pleasure in which we find our 
amusement and recreation ? Why should we be 
less tolerant of one another in this respect than 
in respect to varieties of religious faith and wor- 
ship ? If the main thing is, as here contended, 
that all life shall be controlled from above ; that, 
whether we laugh or whether we lift up our 
hands in prayer, a common spirit of sincerity 
and spontaneity shall be ours ; that sport and re- 
ligion shall be equally shot through and through 



132 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

with a divine purpose and a big, brotherly spirit 
of co-operation, why cannot we be a little toler- 
ant at " both ends of the game," if we may put 
it in that vernacular way ? 

It is not half so important that we either con- 
demn or justify dance and theater, or any other 
definite and particular type of recreation, as it is 
that we get together as to the real ends of play 
itself, and as to the unity of such ends with all 
other ends which men and women have a right 
to seek. Let us all admit that religion and recre- 
ation are not two things in spirit and purpose, but 
fundamentally one, and let us make this the heart 
of our evangel, whether we talk spirituality or 
sport, and we shall speedily get rid on all sides of 
a lot of unreality which now passes for the spirit- 
ual and of a lot of bestiality which now passes 
for sport. We have dealt both with religion and 
with pleasure altogether too much from the stand- 
point of the external and the incidental, and not 
half enough with regard to the spirit and purpose 
in and for which they exist. It is not how you 
pray, — whether on your knees or on your feet, 
whether with your own unstudied words or with 
the carefully considered sentences of another, — 
that counts, so much as the imoard motives and 
the valid objectives of your prayer, — what you 
want of God, and whether, after all, you really 
do want it. 

Here is the old Puritan divine's way of putting 



SPOET AND EVANGELISM 133 

it, — John Trapp's "Golden Statement." "God 
respecteth not the arithmetic of our prayers, how 
many they are ; nor the rhetoric of our prayers, 
how neat they are; nor the geometry of our 
prayers, how long they are ; nor the music of our 
prayers, how melodious they are ; nor the logic 
of our prayers, how methodical they are ; but the 
divinity of our prayers, how heart-sprung they 
are. Not gifts but graces prevail in prayer." 

"Why think that God is less tolerant with re- 
spect to our playing than with respect to our 
praying ? Why make the minor matters of form 
more important in our evangel of recreation than 
we make them, when we deal wisely, in our evan- 
gel of religion ? If parents can watch their chil- 
dren playing in the streets in the early evening 
with a large unconcern as to just what form the 
pastimes take, so long as they are controlled by a 
spirit of carefulness, of mutual consideration, and 
of healthy enthusiasm, why should we be more 
rigid in representing the attitude of our Heavenly 
Father toward the manner in which we elders 
play ? Is not this the test with our fathers and 
mothers here, — that whether the children work 
or play, they shall do all healthfully and help- 
fully, so as to serve life and growth ? Why not 
make this the test also with God ? 

There is not intended here, either directly or 
indirectly, any apology for any kind of physically 
or morally unhealthful play. Neither is it con- 



134 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

tended that one expression of religion is as good 
as another. The claim is rather that the fault of 
our ordinary teaching, with respect both to relig- 
ion and to recreation, has been that we have 
treated mistakes in both instances too much from 
the outside. We have put all our emphasis upon 
symptoms rather than upon inner conditions. 
" Out of the heart are the issues of life," whether 
we talk of life moral or life physical. Make re- 
ligion sincere and it will in time find its own best 
expression. Make recreation moral in purpose, 
fill the whole spirit of it with the sense of God as 
filling all life, and the more mischievous forms of 
recreation will slough off of themselves. Evan- 
gelize both at the heart and you will most ef- 
fectively and thoroughly evangelize both to the 
utmost circumference. 

There is an expression of the ball-field which is 
sometimes heard also in the business world, " Play 
ball." That is, quit shamming and trifling and 
fooling around the edges of things, and get at the 
real business for which you are here. ISTow this, 
which is so close to the spirit of sport, is the spirit 
which is sorely needed in all our evangelism, 
whether we deal directly with what we call the 
sacred or the secular, — a distinction which is itself 
a mischievous misuse of terms. Religion needs to 
" play ball," to get down to reality, to put far from 
it all shamming, and to deal in a really big way 
with really big things. When this is done, being 



SPOET AND EVANGELISM 135 

religious will be as natural, as bracingly attrac- 
tive, as the heartiest kind of honest sport. 

And our talk of recreation in pulpit and pew 
needs the same invigorating directness about it. 
The very heart of evangelism is the insistence 
upon God as the sovereign fact of life. Let us so 
insist with respect to play. Play as you please, 
so that you please to play in harmony with the 
rules of the game ; — not the sport itself conceived 
as the game, but the game conceived as nothing 
less than the object and end of Ufe. To be " Billy 
Sundayish " for a moment, " quit kidding and play 
ball." Quit putting the incidental first, whether 
you pray or play, whether you laugh or look up 
in spiritual appeal, and get before you the real 
goal of all your human goings, which is, to he 
your utmost for time and eternity^ and to help 
others to he the same. That's the game. We need 
to insist upon it as directly as the " coach " insists 
that both team and individual player shall " play 
ball." Evangelism, indeed, is a larger kind of 
"coaching." The evangelist needs the immedi- 
ateness of the coach on the athletic field. The 
coach needs the far-sightedness of the evangelist. 
And life in all its phases needs the qualities of 
both. We need to put more laughter into our 
thought of God and more thought of God into 
our laughter ; and to do this we must put more of 
downright directness into all life. 



CHAPTER X 
THE DIFFUSION OF DELIGHT 

It is much to feel in an individual way the 
moral values of laughter, and to seek such values 
with a clear perception of the one paramount pur- 
pose for which we live. It is hardly less impor- 
tant, in the midst of our complex modern life, to 
see the social bearings of the subject, and to work 
both for a better legislation with respect to play, 
and for a more compelling public sentiment which 
shall make sport as high-minded as religion, and 
which, inversely, shall interpret religion in terms 
of human experience as spontaneous and vigorous 
as sport. But, if we are to save our amusements 
for the largest individual and social ends, there is 
still something to be desired, not less important 
than either of these. And that something is the 
recognition of the fact that the salvation of the 
laughter side of life depends, in great degree, 
upon what is here phrased as the diffusion of 
delight. 

There is a term much used in our day, com- 
monly thought of as a medical expression, but in 
reality much more widely employed, which, when 
applied to the amusement problem, goes far to 
explain what is the matter with the play life of 
136 



THE DIFFUSION OF DELIGHT 137 

the world to-day. That is the word congestion. 
The dictionary defines it in a pathological way as 
" an abnormal accumulation of blood in the vessels 
of an organ ; as, congestion of the brain." Every- 
body knows how serious such congestion may be- 
come, and all who admit the physical phenomena 
of disease as having reality, will also admit that 
much of our trouble of a bodily character is due 
to congestion at some point or other in our phys- 
ical system. All manner of fevers and pains and 
consequent disablement and death proceed from 
congestion of that which, when properly diffused 
and circulated, is the source of strength and of 
life itself. 

Nor is this less true in a social way. The " con- 
gestion of population " in our great cities is a 
familiar complaint among the sociologists of the 
day. " Back to the land," is the cry of those who 
maintain, with much show of reason, that a more 
equable distribution of population would make for 
much more of sane, clean living throughout the 
world. 

Of similar import is the complaint against the 
" congestion of capital " in the financial world. 
William Booth was an evangelist, rather than an 
agitator or even a reformer, yet in that powerful 
social tract, " In Darkest England," he says suc- 
cinctly, "It is the congestion of capital that is 
evil, and the labor question will never be finally 
solved until every laborer is his own capitalist." 



138 LAUGHTER AND LIFE 

"Whatever we may think of this particular utter- 
ance, or of the proposed remedies with which men 
seek to-day to overcome congestion in the fields 
of the common work and the common wealth, it 
is evident that, before there is anything like a 
" final solution " of the big world-issues which vex 
us to-day, we are going to distribute authority 
and opportunity in some way among the many 
much more than such diffusion now prevails. A 
wider diffusion of intelligence and character and 
social activity and responsibility is the only way 
in which the common good can be realized in 
increasing degree. 

The same considerations apply with equal force 
to those phases of life which we are especially 
considering. If the body suffers from congestion 
of blood here and there ; if every country to-day 
is more or less the victim of the modern tendency 
toward the congestion of population in great cities ; 
if the industrial world exhibits such deplorable 
conditions as Booth describes in his "Darkest 
England " because of the congestion of capital, it 
is likewise true that, both in an individual and 
in a social way, our pleasure life is diseased in the 
same manner, and the same remedy of a more 
equable distribution must be sought. We shall 
never get a sound amusement life until we have 
democratized it, or, to use broader terms, until we 
have leveled and equalized it both in a personal 
and in a collective way. " Every valley shall be 



THE DIFFUSION OF DELIGHT 139 

filled, and every mountain and hill shall be 
brought low, and the crooked shall become straight, 
and the rough ways smooth ; and all flesh shall see 
the salvation of God." 

So said the ancient prophet, and the words are 
applied by one of later time to the ministry of the 
great forerunner of Jesus, whose work it was to 
announce and to usher in the kingdom of God. 
So, also, may we use these words to-day as the re- 
ligious expression of the world's demand for de- 
mocracy, in the widest sense of that term, as a 
remedy for those evils which we suffer by reason 
of the congestions which afflict humankind. De- 
mocracy is but another word for the diffusion of 
life, and the " more abundant life " can come to 
pass only as life is everywhere more widely dis- 
tributed. 

Our amusements are full of unsightly hills and 
valleys which will have to be leveled down and 
filled up before we make the kingdom of laughter 
to become the kingdom of God. Inequality, per- 
verted emphasis, is everywhere. The world of 
laughter is a world of caricature, for caricature is 
emphasis out of proportion. It is the exaggera- 
tion of one feature as against another. The es- 
sence of beauty is harmony. So also is it with 
strength. Our play life to-day is neither beautiful 
nor strong, because it lacks harmony, proportion, 
distribution. We need the leveling process to a 
much greater degree than most of us suspect, if 



140 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

we are really to learn what it means to laugh unto 
God. "We need it with reference to the present 
specializing of those who play. We need it with 
reference to the special forms and seasons of play. 
And we need it particularly with reference to the 
present limitations of laughter and amusement in 
relation to the individual Hfe. 

There has been much talk of recent years about 
the mischief of professional athletics in schools. 
The talk has done something to create a better 
sentiment and to compel wiser legislation in this 
regard. "Professionals" are barred from the 
sporting events of practically all educational insti- 
tutions to-day. But there is still altogether too 
much professionalism about the players and the 
play. Field days and athletic events are looked 
at by the bulk of the student body, not from the 
standpoint of participants, but from the standpoint 
of interested and partisan spectators. Only a hand- 
ful get whatever benefit there is in the actual physi- 
cal exercise involved, and these get the exercise in 
such perverted and exaggerated form that it is 
often more harmful than beneficial to them. 

To say nothing of the mischievous excitement 
which results from partisan competition in school 
sports, the gambling which is with great difficulty 
suppressed, and the extravagances of side-line 
" rooting " and convivial celebrations of much 
overvalued victories, there must be taken into ac- 
count the ordinary failure of gymnastic training 



THE DIFFUSION OF DELIGHT 141 

for the multitude of the students, who have no en- 
thusiasm except for " sporty " athletics. And when 
every allowance is made for the improvement, 
within recent years, of school discipline with re- 
gard to the whole matter of school sport, there is 
still a large reckoning to the bad, because play is 
too much regarded as a specialty and not as the 
common right and property of all. The diffusion 
of athletic discipline throughout the whole student 
body is still the prime need of school athletics. 
'No amount of shouting for the successes of the 
local team can ever compensate for the failure to 
give every boy and girl in school the delight and 
benefit of a full physical discipline. 

This is just as true for the rest of us as it is for 
the boys and girls in school. All of us take our 
play altogether too much by proxy. All of us are 
too much concerned with professional achieve- 
ment and the victories of our favorites, and too 
little concerned with the securing of whatever 
benefit there is in physical prowess and skill for 
each and every one. We are professionalized to 
death. And it is doubtful whether at any point 
we suffer more serious harm from professionalism 
than we do by taming over so much of our play 
and our enjoyment to a class of specialized enter- 
tainers. If the waters of joy, which too often are 
veritable destructive freshets and swamp-making 
inundations, were distributed as they ought to be 
over all the areas of common life, the saving to 



142 LAUGHTEE AND LIFE 

society of the bodies and the souls of men would 
be great beyond the power of words to say. 

If it be contended that some professionalism is 
necessary throughout the whole range of life, this 
may be admitted without consenting to its preva- 
lence to any such extent as is true to-day. There 
is very much less need of professionalism all along 
the line than most of us are ready to allow. The 
whole trend of our religion, and of the democracy 
which is most akin to fundamental Christianity, is 
away from all monopoly of either goods or good. 
And it is just as much away from the monopoly 
of laughter as it is away from the monopoly of 
labor and the products of toil. 

To-morrow will make vastly more of play as 
the common right and duty of us all, on all days 
as well as holidays, in the later years of life as 
well as in the youthful years. There will still 
be special entertainers, no doubt, trained athletes, 
and performers of varied types, but there will be 
much more attention paid to the training of all 
in the arts of amusement, for their own sakes and 
for the sake of the contribution which all may 
make toward the common joy. There is, in fact, 
a much more equable distribution of ability on all 
lines than the world has yet been willing to con- 
cede. Massachusetts may not be able to raise as 
large geraniums or pumpkins as California, and 
her climate may never permit Boston suburbs to 
compete with the suburbs of Los Angeles in the 



THE DIFFUSION OF DELIGHT 143 

cultivation of the orange and the olive and other 
semi-tropical fruits ; but when all the returns are 
in, it will be found that the East has its own con- 
tribution to make to the tables of the world, and 
that in relation to the sum of human service 
which is needed for the common comfort and joy, 
one part of the world has importance as well as 
another. So also will it be found at length that 
all men and women are gifted in their own way 
in producing the fruits of joy, and that the multi- 
tude have their own contribution to make to the 
fulness of human delight. 

There will always be holidays, no doubt. But 
all days will take on very much more of the holi- 
day character, before we are through with human 
progress toward the heavenly mood on earth. 
There is very much less danger that the Sabbath 
will eventually be lost than there is happy promise 
that by and by we are going to make Sabbaths 
of all our days, by recognizing the essential holi- 
ness of all our hours. Even now there is more 
desecration of week-days than of Sundays, and 
we are beginning to realize that we can save one 
day unto God only by saving them all. Youth 
will always play more sportively than age. But 
as already indicated, the prophet's vision of play- 
ful youth and peaceful, smiling age is one vision. 
We shall give the children more of what we have 
beforetime reserved for age, — more of place in 
the counsels of both local and national govern- 



144 LAUGHTER AND LIFE 

ments. But we shall also give age more of what 
we have long regarded as the special liberty of 
youth, — more of laughter, more of the amusement 
life, more of the abandon of play. Half of our 
getting old is forgetting how to be amused. We 
ought to diffuse through all our days the merri- 
ment which we have been too much inclined to 
hold as the exclusive privilege of youthful years. 

There is one thing more to be said. The deep- 
est part of the problem of amusement lies still 
farther out from the shores of specialism and 
monopoly. It is more than a matter of ceasing 
from the emphasis of special performers who do 
our playing for us by proxy, and giving all men 
and women everywhere the full opportunity to 
express themselves in a sportive way. It is more 
than the diffusion of the holiday mood through- 
out the days between holidays, or the assertion of 
the equal right of age and youth to happiness and 
mirth. Our amusements will profit by all such 
diffusion of delight, and only as we so distribute 
play are we going to save it from the evils of its 
present congested state. But we must also learn 
that as work is a curse when it is only work, so 
also play is a mischief when it is only play. The 
diffusion of delight means more than making play 
accessible to all, at all times, and at every stage 
of life. It means, in a way, making play itself 
unnecessary by making our very labors an amuse- 
ment and a delight. 



THE DIFFUSION OF DELIGHT 145 

In one of his best writings, The Gosjpelfor an 
Age of Dotiht, Dr. Henry van Dyke recites the 
following striking lines, introducing the verse with 
these illuminating words in prose : " That is the 
debt which every child of God owes, not only to 
God, but to his own soul — to find the real joy of 
living." Then follows this brief but telling poem : 

" 'Joy is a duty,' — so with golden lore 

The Hebrew rabbis taught in days of yore. 
And happy human hearts heard in their speech 
Almost the highest wisdom man can reach. 

" But one bright peak still rises far above, 
And there the Master stands whose name is Love, 
Saying to those whom heavy tasks employ, 
* Life is divine when duty is a joy. ' ' ' 

Here is expressed the heart of what is meant by 
the diffusion of delight. JSTo man has solved the 
problem of amusement until he has found it un- 
necessary to be amused. He only is really enter- 
tained who does not have to be entertained, to 
whom life itself is entertainment all the time, 
whose work entertains him more than any so- 
called entertainment can. "We shall never solve 
the problem of labor till we make all men's work 
such that there is full opportunity for pleasure in 
it. And we shall never solve the problem of 
pleasure till we make our amusements, in the main 
at least, real employments, and employments that 
are suffused through and through with the restful- 



146 LAUGHTER AND LIFE 

ness, the enthusiasm, and the ecstasy of play. 
Though this may seem to some as a dream, it is 
the goal toward which we move both in the indus- 
trial world and in the world of rational recreation. 
Some day our factories will be playgrounds, and 
our playgrounds factories, and there will be a 
blending of creation and recreation which will be 
the salvation of both. 

Until then it is our duty, and our delight, to 
seek individually to realize this ideal in ourselves, 
and to promote it in society at large. Already 
there are many who have attained, who do not 
have to stop play in order to work, or to stop 
work in order to play, but who are doing both all 
the time, working for the joy of others when they 
play, and truly playing for their own amusement 
when they work. There is no amusement prob- 
lem so far as they themselves are concerned. 
All life has caught and holds the glow of everlast- 
ing youth. They are laughing for God while 
they labor, and laboring for God while they laugh. 
It is with them no question of special persons, or 
special places, or special seasons and ages ; but 
whether they are alone or with others, whether it 
is a holiday or recreation hour or just some com- 
mon day and some undistinguished period of the 
day, whether they are reckoned seven or seventy 
years young, they play while they work and they 
w^ork while they play, and the sheer delight of 
living is the richest delight they can know. This 



THE DIFFUSION OF DELIGHT 147 

was the great Apostle's "finally," was it not? 
" Finally, rejoice in the Lord always, and again I 
will say rejoice." In other words, learn how to 
make amusement no problem by finding amuse- 
ment in every problem. 

The secret of wealth is not in finding it in a box, 
but in finding it everywhere. So also is the secret 
of happiness, of laughter, of fun. They are always 
on the way to become jaded who seek entertain- 
ment in entertainments. Theirs is perennial pleas- 
ure who find enjoyment in all things, whether they 
are reckoned enjoyments or not. There is no 
work harder than fun when fun is made a business, 
and no fun that is lighter than work when busi- 
ness is made what it ought to be, — enjoyment and 
delight. And this is possible, even for the man 
who cannot choose his work to-day, if he will 
steadfastly hold fast this ideal of the diffusion of 
delight, and will study to make work as enjoyable 
as play. 

Laughing unto God means a great deal more 
than making our fun wholesome when we are 
"funning," making our recognized amusements 
personally and socially sound. They laugh best 
for God who have learned how to spread the 
fertilizing spirit of fun over all the broad acres of 
the serious business of life. 



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